mocapgod/docs/CAPTURE.md

Filming protocol — read once, keep on the tripod

One page. Follow it and the pose engine has an easy time; break it and Lane C fights soup.

The shot

• Phone landscape, on a tripod or leaned so it can't move. Never handheld, never portrait.
• 1080p, 60fps. 4K is wasted — pose models downscale anyway. 60fps → we resample to 30.
• Whole body in frame the entire take — feet included. If a foot leaves the frame, the ground contact is lost and the clip drifts. Frame with headroom top and bottom.
• 2–3 m from the phone. Close enough to fill the frame, far enough that a step doesn't clip you out.
• Even light, plain-ish background. No harsh single-side shadow, no busy patterns behind you.
• Fitted clothes. Baggy hoodies and swishy pants = joint error. Snug beats stylish here.

The take

1. Start in a T-pose, hold ~1 s. Arms straight out, legs together, facing the phone.
2. Do one move — a walk, a DJ scratch, a pick-up. One move per take.
3. End in a T-pose, hold ~1 s.
4. Keep takes 5–30 s. Short and clean beats long and mushy. Re-film rather than salvage.

The T-pose bookends are not optional: they're the calibration reference and the anchor Lane C uses to auto-trim the clip. No bookends → manual trimming.

Getting it to the pipeline

• AirDrop the clip from the phone to ultra, save into ~/Documents/MOCAPGOD/capture/inbox/.
• Then run python3 ingest.py (or let the Lane D mocap CLI do it). Ingest validates, normalizes to 30fps, and puts it in the local pose queue (queue/ on ultra, where the engine runs). Rejects (portrait, no feet, garbage) land in capture/rejected/ with a reason in capture/LEDGER.tsv — check there if a clip vanishes. (--remote-queue ships to m3ultra instead.)

Common rejections (and the fix)

Symptom	Fix
portrait	Rotate the phone. Landscape only.
too short / malformed	Re-film; hold the T-poses, aim for 5–30 s.
drifty / foot-skating result	Feet left the frame, or baggy clothes — re-film closer to protocol.