Sift - Getting Started

The purpose of this section is to orient new users to Sifts user interface and the general functions available for processing motion capture data. More detailed instructions and details can be found on our documentation and tutorials pages.
This section assumes you have already Installed and activated Sift.

Walk-through

Learn how to load an existing CMZ Library, normalize all signals in the Link Model Based folder, average left and right sides together, then calculate, plot and export the mean data, all done in under five minutes.

1. After opening Sift, while on the Load page select Load Library



2. Select browse and navigate to and select the folder containing the data you wish to import, then press load.

3. After your library has been loaded, ensure that all the expected CMZ's are present (Pressing the + next to the CMZ ||will expand it to display the individual C3Ds associated)

4. On the left of the screen select the Explore tab

5. From the explore page select Query Builder

6. Press Auto-Populate Queries

7. Leave the default values and press create

8. Press Calculate All Queries

9. Wait for the calculations to finish, note the progress bar on the bottom of the main screen

10. When all Queries have been calculated select AnkleAngle_X in the groups display box, this will populate the workspace display box, select all workspaces by clicking the top most workspace and dragging down to the last with the left mouse |button still held down. Then press Refresh Plot

11. If the plot displayed is all one color, we need to set the displayed data style to workspace, press Data Styles

12. In the Display Styles From... section ensure Workspace is selected the exit the dialog

13. Looking at the plot we notice that one trace seems to be out of place

14. Left click on the trace to isolate it
15. Then right click and select Exclude -> Exclude Trace (raw data)
16. The trace is now excluded from the plot
17. We want the workspace mean and dispersion displayed and not the individual traces, so uncheck Plot All Traces, and check Plot Workspace Mean and Plot Workspace Dispersion then press Refresh Plot
18. We also want to display the Y and Z dimensions of the ankle angle, so we need some more plots. On the toolbar press |show general options
19. Set graph rows to 3 and exit the dialog
20. Select the second plot, selecting AnkleAngle_Y and all workspaces then hit Refresh Plot
21. Select and exclude the problematic trace
Uncheck Plot All Traces and check Plot Workspace Mean and Plot Workspace Dispersion
22. Select the final plot, selecting AnkleAngle_Z and all workspaces then hit Refresh Plot.
23. Select and exclude the problematic trace.
24. Uncheck Plot All Traces and check Plot Workspace Mean and Plot Workspace Dispersion
25. We now have the graphs plotted and we're ready to export the data: on the toolbar press Export Results
26. In the Export Results dialog check Workspace Mean and Workspace Std. Dev. then press generate preview to verify the data
27. Select Browse and navigate to the desired export folder, provide a name for the export file and then press export
28. Navigate to the selected export folder to ensure the file was exported correctly and inspect the data