I'm trying to take snapshots of my ARSCNView, to put them into a video composition via AVAssetWriterInputPixelBufferAdaptor. This is all for iPhone X only, at the moment.
I've been measuring the time taken for a call to ARSCNView.snapshot(), and it takes 15-19ms with my configuration. That's using the ARKit default video format (it didn't seem to be allowing me to change this, I think it's 1280x720 and at least 60fps). The snapshot yields an image of both the video capture frame and the 3D scene on top. I doubt this matters, but my 3D scene is very simple - one low poly model is in the scene, nothing else.
If this call takes 19ms, we can't snapshot 60 times per second, so there won't be consistent 60fps video created.
Has anyone used the snapshot method in this way, and do you know whether this sounds right? The device is powerful, and I hoped that there'd be a way to record at this rate. I've seen other ways to access SceneKit data, like having a second SCNSceneRenderer, and this has worked for me when recording non-ARKit SceneKit scenes, but I need to be able to obtain the video capture data as well as the 3D scene, and ARKit's snapshot is the only way I've found that gives this. There's a capturedImage property that returns a CVPixelBuffer, but that's only the video capture and not the overlaid 3D scene. Perhaps that means I could take this capturedImage video data, and access the 3D scene via OpenGL, and then combined them myself, but I can't imagine why that approach would be automatically more efficient than an internal method provided by ARKit/SceneKit APIs.
Thanks