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Editing video project to play over 3 Video projectors
Hi,
Editing video project to play over 3 Video projectors.My boss is looking for a way to be able to take 3 video clips that are 640 x 480 and combine them into one wide clip.
Then play the file back though a Matrox or other video card that allows multiple outputs, to the projectors.
Any suggestions, or better alternatives?
Thanks,
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4 Replies
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This is going to be a length post – but if you don’t mind a bit of experimenting…
I have just been through a very long exercise to achieve exactly this, and taking a lot of advice from this (and the live events) forum – I came up with something that worked really, really well. It was all new to me – there was a huge amount of experimenting. I will say that there is very good professional equipment out there which will do this really well but I was on a budget (a very tight one) – and I was really pleased with the outcome.
I used a matrox triple-head, VMS, and movie-player home cinema and it all worked out fine.
Doing a school show, I wanted three screens – one on either side of the stage, and one above it. Each screen had to have a different image appear on it, in time to the music, so at any one time there were three different images on the screens – one image per screen if you follow…
To do this I set the projectors to be each 640 x 480, and then in Vegas I set my project properties to be 1920 x 480 – which gives a widescreen in effect of 3 x (640 x 480).
In VMS, I made sure that each of the images was restricted to its own region (LHS, CENTER or RHS). This is very easy to do with the pan/cropping facilities. It did take a little bit of practice, but in the end it worked out fine.
When rendering, I rendered to 1920 x 480 wmv.
Playing the image for the show was a little trickier, as I wanted to be able to cue up the video and then when ready, have the images displayed on the projector.
I used a PC with a graphics card with two separate outputs. You need to make sure that whatever card you use, that you can set the resolutions of the two outputs independently, and that at least one output can go up to 1920 in resolution.
Connect your PC monitor to the first output of the graphics card – this will be for cueing up and preparing for playback.
Connect the matrix triplehead to the second output. Set the resolution of the graphics card output to 1920 * 480, and set the matrox for 3 x (640 * 480).
The projectors were at the far end of the hall, so we used three VGA to CAT5 baluns from Mcmelectronics – really neat little devices which allow you send VGA over cat 5. These devices had no problem with the 1920 resolution. The projectors were between 50 and 80 feet from the desk, and had no issues.
For actual playback I used the free (and superb) media player classic – home cinema version. I tried a number of different players (including VLC) but for me, I really only got what I needed from MPC.. I am sure VLC would work, but I had only so much time to try and learn all this!!
In MPC you will need to go into Opions, Playback, Output and set video settings, and choose Direct X as your output device, and select Display 2 from the drop down in ‘Full Screen Output’. This means that any file payed back in ‘full screen mode’ will be sent to output 2 which is the matrox – and so you will see the output on the projectors connected to the matrox, but still have you main screen for cueing etc.
Also in (Options, Player) – set ‘Launch files in fullscreen’ and also set ‘exit fullscreen when finished playback’. This means that when you start playing a video it will send output to the matrox and then when finished, automatically return focus to your main window. You may need to experiment a bit here.. In MPC you can play about with settings to remove screen borders, toolbars etc in full-screen mode so all you should see is your video – no controls, menu bars, borders etc.
Sorry about the long post, but there are a few steps involved – but it does work, appears to be reliable, and until I splash out on some of the dedicated software designed specially for this task this will do fine…
Stewart Bourke
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Wow – that sounds like a fun project. How many hours did you put into the final production?
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
Steve,
It was a fun project – I spent too many hours on it frankly – but mine is a hobby… It was my first big show since I moved from Pinnacle, and so it was a great learning exercise. I reckon I spent approx 2 hours of prep for each minute of show-time (for the images) – so 120 hours (hmmm, now I know where the weekends went…). This included learning about the matrox, figuring out the three-projector setup etc and especially Vegas – which is such an amazing application…
As I keep saying, I doubt it would have worked as well as it did without the folks on this forum.
Stewart Bourke
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Stewart,
Thanks, for the information.
I wasn’t sure if it was possible to render 1920 x 480.
Also wasn’t to sure about how to interface that with 3 split outputs.
It is always helpful when someone has done it before sucessfully!thanks,
Rich Lentz
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