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Best Codec for multi-screen project?
I am working on a High Def project that spans 4 monitors (7680*1080). What is the best codec to use for this project? the animation codec produces data rates that are too high (playback is jerky). The H264 quits AE with a memory error. Sorenson 3 shows artifacting. Any suggestions? Thanks.
AE 6.5
comp: 7680 * 1080; 24 fps
OSX 10.4.37
2×2.66 GHZ Dual-Core
3 PCI Gforce 7300 video cards
Ram: 2 GB 6.67 Mhz -
13 Replies
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I think you have four computers, each playing a 1920×1080 file off a hard drive, yes?
If it’s a hard drive, you could try rendering animation out of AE, then using QT (or QT Pro) to convert that to H.264. Or you could render out of AE to Photo-JPEG.
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Hi Steve,
thanks for the reply. Actually let me explain more clearly.
I am working on a High Def project for a Restaurant. The idea is to play a series of 7680 * 1080 movies across four HD monitors arranged horizontally to give the appearance of one large panoramic display. The four displays are driven by one Mac Pro Tower and two Gforce 7300 video cards over single DVI cables.
I have created the movies in After Effects using various codecs but I am having playback issues playing these single large movies across all four screens. I am now thinking about dividing the original movies into four 1920*1080 movies and synching them on playback so they play as one movie. Is there a way to do this?
An Apple tech I spoke with said the single movie playback problem is not hardware, but software. He said the Mac Pro hardware can support throughput of 150 mbps. But the QT software codecs can not decode a movie of this size fast enough. The animation codec plays back jerky. The H264 doesn’t support a frame size of 7680 * 1080. Sorenson 3 shows artifacting in the final product.
Can someone suggest the best way to handle this in Quicktime? Is there an alternative codec to try?
Otherwise, is there a better technology? What is Apple’s Quartz Composer technology? Is this a way to sync four movies to play as one?
In the mean time I will try converting movies to H264 in QT Pro as well as using Photo-JPEG in AE.
Thanks.
AE 6.5
comp: 7680 * 1080; 24 fps
OSX 10.4.37
2×2.66 GHZ Xeon Dual-Core
3 PCI Gforce 7300 video cards
Ram: 2 GB 6.67 Mhz -
Oh, I see. You wanted to spread one large movie over four monitors? That’s one big movie, and you’d have to find a codec that has a low enough data rate for that. Try Photo-JPEG, but I’m not optimistic.
To sync four movies, there is a solution used by museums and the like: It’s called Watchout by Dataton.
Don’t trust Apple techs on video. They don’t know our business. I don’t think a SATA drive can play back a 7680×1080 29.97 Animation video. The drive is the bottleneck.
Sorry, that’s the best I can do. Try Photo-JPEG, or one of the Motion-JPEG-A or -B codecs. Or look into Watchout.
Hope that helps.
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Hi,
I’ve worked on a number of presentations where we used multiple synced computers to playback up to six 1920X1080 projections. We worked with an AV place that had a system that automatically synced the computers. We created a single large presentation, this was later divided for each of the computers to playback. It worked perfectly and you couldn’t even see where the different screens joined each other. We used Blackmagic codec for these projects.
Also, I’ve been working with a really incredible codec for a feature I’m doing a lot of AE work on. It’s called Cineform. The plus size is that it supports a horizontal of up to 2000 lines. It will support twice that in the near future. The quality is absolutely flawless. You can’t discern the difference between Cineform and uncompressed QT, but depending on your settings, the Cineform will be up to 1/15th the size of the uncompressed file. You can edit HD off a single Firewire 800 drive. This is absolutely true, we’ve tested it extensively. The downside right now is that it’s only available on PC. They’re working on the Mac version; it should be out in about two to three months. But this might be the perfect codec for your project.
Eric
Eric Goldstein
Giraffe Film Company
Los Angeles
eric@giraffefilm.com -
Well you’ve run into the problem of feeding the 4 monitors with a single node… Even a quad G5 with serious cajones runs into bandwidth trouble here. This is exactly the kind of gig that my studio specializes in. Here’s the lowdown.
If you are going to try to keep it feeding from one node, you have to minimize file size and bitrate to make it happen. You had also better be using a RAID based disk playback… 9 times out of 10 when a platform chokes on playing media it’s all about disk throughput; it’s generally NOT about the graphics card choking. In terms of CODEC the Quicktime PhotoJPEG codec is one we swear by (most of the time, albeit usually with less monitor space than you are talking about). Setting the quality level at between 68 and 78 percent generally nicely limits file sizes while maintaining quality. But I doubt it’s gonna work at that resolution.
Your other obvious option is to go with MPEG2 playback. MPEG2 can be customised to limit bitrate, and it can deal with odd aspect ratio and resolution. The problem can be finding a good encoding scenario. There isn’t a really good one on Mac… What you want to do is author out of AE in a good quality codec (PhotoJPEG, maybe Animation), and then run that media through an MPEG encoding environment. Compressor is one option on the Mac, but it is SLOOOOOOOOOW and doesn’t offer deep controls for setting up MPEG right. We (gulp) use ProCoder on a PC platform for encoding. Procoder is, IMHO, the BEST software based media encoding solution out there, period. To get better, you have to start looking at hardware based encoding cards. Unfortunately ProCoder only runs on windows. But it makes stunning, beautiful, very tight MPEG files.
You MIGHT try to make the file into Flash video. SWF files are without question the smallest file sizes for what they convey, but getting flash video to not be artifacted at that size and resolution is a conundrum I haven’t quite figured out. I can’t believe how small the filesizes are, and certainly the reason YouTube exists is because Flash Video makes it possible for ANYBODY with ANY platform to see stuff fast… But again, I don’t know at that resolution. It’s worth a shot though…
Here’s how we do this in the professional world of multi display gigs: Media Server platforms. There are many different ones out there, but the two we tend to gravitate to are the Hippotizer Media Server and the Watchout System. Watchout is a product from Dataton. Basically it alots one computer per display (not necessarily crazy powerful computers, you can actually use Mac Minis), and then the ‘master’ computer takes the large unified media file and splits the workload of displaying it up between the individual display nodes. It works like a charm, and I’ve driven big multi display situations with up to 28 different monitors or projectors making one display with nary a hiccup. The Hippotizer is another option that we love. Each Hippo can handle up to 2 displays (apparently up to 4 after software v3 comes out in January). Each Hippo sits in a very fast PC based platform with a RAID array serving up MPEG 2 files. Either of these systems is gonna set you back financially of course… A Hippo HD (which can easily run the resolution you are attempting) runs around $38k street price. A watchout system with 4 display nodes, plus a master, and the software, would probably set you back around $14k to $18k. The other alternative would be to use professional quality DVD decks from Pioneer that would allow you to author the monitor feeds seperately and then trigger them all to playback in frame accurate sync (via machine control). Each player goes for around $5k, and a simple serial device control (say Dataton Trax or Medialon Manager) will run you another $3k or so, plus the cost of the host computer.
As you can see this is a field without easy answers, and that has a high degree of complexity. I’d say that 50% of my business happens as a result of folks who haven’t tried this before, think it’s simple, and then end up calling in the cavalry (us) after crashing and burning for awhile. Donm’t mean to demoralize you… There’s just a HUGE difference between a computer being able to display a desktop across 4 monitors, and it being able to show a piece of media that big. That’s why the feature film industry pays so much money for digital imtermediate work. Platforms with that kind of horsepower are still rare, and always purpose built.
Good Luck…
Bob Bonniol
MODE Studios
http://www.modestudios.com
Contributing Editor, Entertainment Design Magazine
Art of the Edit Forum Leader
Live & Stage Event Forum Leader
HD Forum Leader -
Bob, thanks for the feedback!
This is not comforting news though. I tried more tests by rendering the additional codecs mentioned earlier with out much luck. I was however able to get 4 HD movies (H.264) to play back pretty well on the seperate monitors. Have you heard of Apple’s Quartz Composer technology new in Tiger? I am told you can program multiple displays using it. I was hoping I could synch the movies using QC instead of flash which would allow the use of H.264. Any thoughts?
I am also looking into Watchout
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Auguste,
Well QC is certainly a robust API for dealing with the OSX graphics engine; I HAVE heard of it, and used it. I can’t say I’ve tried to develop a synchronised file playback object for multi monitors, but it may be possible. The stuff I’ve done with it was more to alter desktop appearance and background stuff for purpose-intended installs (i.e. when pieces of media failed in playback, or playback engines unexpectedly quit, I’ve made custom desktop scenarios with QC so that audiences or viewers didn’t get ‘shocking’ looks at the underlying desktop). Essentially applications crashed out to neutral, icon free gradients. Pretty simple stuff… But it MIGHT be possible to use QC to do this, and by this I mean coordinated full screen playback of 4 seperate files… I’ll give it a spin, see what I can dig up.
But again, I’m just really concerned for you that you are going to have a tough time with throughput on the disk/Front-Side-Bus/PCI-Bus/Graphics card side if you try to reliably playback off one machine. Can you tell me, are you at least running off a disk array, rather than a single disk ? By disk array, I’m hoping at least a simple multi disk JBOD RAID… Something simple like a SATA Raid can be easy to set up. The most dependable scenario for that kind of playback would be an array of 4 drives. Ideally an XRaid or a Huge Systems external solution over SCSI or Fiber is going to be way better, but then again, you run into that budget wall.
Best,
Bob BonniolMODE Studios
http://www.modestudios.com
Contributing Editor, Entertainment Design Magazine
Art of the Edit Forum Leader
Live & Stage Event Forum Leader
HD Forum Leader -
For a relatively cheaper multiscreen software programmer (shareware), try SyncMaker Pro.
But for the best reliability, Bob has given you the options. I would like to add one more though – Wings Platinum (Module Version) from AvStumpfl which I use.
Thomas Leong
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Wings IS also a good option… I just won’t use them because their North American rep (Franklin) is the slimiest, most pushy, worst car salesman cliche type I have ever, ever met. And some of my friends who have worked for a long time at Dataton can provide pretty convincing (code analyzed) arguments that Wings is a bit, um, of a direct derivation of Watchout (shall we say).
So I don’t use it.
But it does the job, thats for sure. Really like how you can create preview sized movies…
Cheers,
BobMODE Studios
http://www.modestudios.com
Contributing Editor, Entertainment Design Magazine
Art of the Edit Forum Leader
Live & Stage Event Forum Leader
HD Forum Leader -
My personal choice to go with Wings was not so much the politics and whatever behind the competition, but that –
1. Prima facie it looked more complicated for any client seated next to me such that it seemed worth paying my fees to do multidisplay work :);
2. It actually does more than just multidisplay work (inter alia Show Control); and
3. There is (has been so far) no extra charge for updates from version 1.00 to 2,40a to date whereas Dataton has been charging extra for each whole digit update.Sincere apologies. This is getting a bit OT. So evaluate one’s own need properly. (Demos are available from each option). But if budget is a primary consideration (as in my own case), then Wings is a cheaper alternative since the Master PC can also be used as a Slave/Display PC, saving the cost of one licence. With ATI graphics cards, Wings can save more as it can be configured to use the dual-head of the graphics card to output 2 differing videos with the one licence whereas the competition are one licence per output, peroid. In other words, the Master/Production PC cannot be used as a display output. It can only be the control program. For us poor blighters with no-big-budget clients, the $$’000s saved can be significant.
Thomas Leong
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