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Best way to edit multi-screen/multi-projector project?
Hi Everyone!
My first post:
I recently signed on to edit a video art installation project that is going to consist of six separate channels of video projected from six separate projectors onto six separate screens. The installation is going to play in a large gallery space, and the images will be projected floor-to-ceiling on 3 walls (2 screens per wall), with viewers standing in the middle of the room.
The viewer experience of the installation is going to be heavily dependent upon the timing of the interplay of the screens to each other, and as such, I need to be able to playback and edit in realtime all six streams of video. Ideally, I’d like to be able to surround myself with 6 monitors at my workstation and assign one stream of video to each monitor so I can get a real sense of how/where to direct viewer attention.
Does anyone have any suggestions for the most cost-effective way of achieving this kind of setup? I’m running MC 4.0.5, and I know there is a multi-cam function, but I don’t imagine it will be particularly useful here?
Thank you so much in advance!
Mac Pro (Early 2008)
8-core Intel Xeon Processor
4GB RAM
Avid Media Composer 4.0.5
OSX 10.5.8 -
4 Replies
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And…bump?
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Jason, I did a very similar video about 15 years ago. A museum install, 4 screens synced up. At points in the show, characters would walk from screen 1 across 2 and 3 and stop on screen 4 The entire piece played off of 4 laser disc ,machines running in tandom. Im afraid my solution was quite simple. The idea of having more than 1 client monitor output wasn’t even thought of. I simply built a 4 layer time line, and put a pic in pic on each one, arranging 4 screens across my monitor. The biggest challenge was getting the overlap from the cameras figured out. For the crossing shots we shot the scene with 4 cameras, but in post they all had to be slightly repo’d to account for overlap, and spacing between the actual monitors. At the end of the process I removed the pic in pics and output 4 separate video tracks. The final installation worked like a charm. Sometimes we look too hard to technology to solve problems that can be done quite simply.
Glenn
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Thanks so much, Glen. That is super helpful, I’ll try it!
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Hey Glen,
Thanks so much again for all your great help.
I’ve been playing with my project, collapsing/nesting my 6 video tracks and applying 3D warp effect to resize the tracks so I can see all 6 at the same time on my client monitor. It’s working, except playback is quite stuttery. I’m keeping the memory info meter open during playback and it doesn’t appear that my memory is being maxed out, although I’m not certain this meter is an accurate gauge. Do you guys have any thoughts as to where the bottlenenck might be that’s causing the playback stutter? RAM, CPU, hard drive read/write, etc?
Everything was captured 10:1 and it’s an SD project. My system specs are in my original post, I’m running Mojo SDI, and the media is split across 3 external FW 800 drives on their own separate bus and a few more TB off a shared storage unit (a poor man’s Unity). The footage is split across all the drives. Is 6 PiP SD video tracks going to give me playaback stutter no matter what I do? Or can I tweak my setup to get it smooth?
Thanks so much again!
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