BIG SCREEN (24 x 80) – Video Production

[Bob Bonniol]

Understanding that the Montage is doing the scaling, what is your playback device ?

If it’s an HD based device (say a Doremi V1HD), than it is understandable why you might go with anamorphic HD output from AE. If it is a resolution independant media server (Hippo, Pandoras), then I would recommend a reduced resolution that is consistent with the real aspect ratio, but reduced enough to make the pipeline manageable. The Montage is already going to be scaling, but you risk visible artifacting in having it perform the re-shaping as well.

Also, just because the projectors are capable of 1400 x 1050 doesn’t mean the staging company intends to run them at native res. Possible or even probable, but not certain. Make sure to check first.

Also, 3500 x 1050 isn’t really crippling if you don’t want to waste any pixels. I’ve gone all the way up to 5k+ on blended rastors.

Good luck.

Bob

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

[Nicholas Rivero]

My company is about to go on a spring tour and our set consists of a 7’x36′ wall with a resolution of 720×3840.
We decided to opt out of doing an edged blended wall because we own 7’x12′ DaLite surfaces so we built our 7’x36′ wall using three screens butted up against each other.
Though we have been building the content in AE at native res with little to no issues. I’m working on a 17″ macbook pro and build everything in quarter res then then do sample renders on a Mac Pro at work.
We render our content out as 720×3840 from AE and then use compressor to render it down into 3 seperate 720×1280/H264 compressed chunks (stage left, center, and stage right).
At the show we are playing back our content from three seperate mac minis using Renewed Visions ProVideo Player software (www.renewedvision.com). So each mac mini plays back it’s respective H264 piece.
Hope this helps, //nick

[Dave Martin]

Thank you Bob..I appreciate the reply…

The playback device should be a Grass Valley Turbo but we could change that if we needed too.

Can you explain the difference between scaling and reshaping? I’m coming from an AE/FCP perspective where I just use the term scaling.

If I would work in a reduced resolution and get the montage to scale it up…what, in your opinion, might be a reasonable resolution to work in?

I’ve never worked in a 3500 x 1050 resolution, even with a mac pro and 8 gigs of ram…I would imagine AE will run pretty slow…would you say?

Thanks for the help Bob…this is new territory…

Martin

– MacPro – Quad Core – 4 gig Ram

-MacBook Pro – 2.16GHz Intel Core Duo – 2 gig Ram

-FCP Studio 5.1.4 – QT 7 – OSX 10 – Firmtek Sata Raid- G-raid dv drive

[Dave Martin]

Thanks Nick

How long is your piece at 720×3840? That just sounds like it would really run fairly slow in AE if you had a lot of complicated elements. I’ve tested a bit with my 3500 x 1080 and it certainly didn’t respond like we would like it too…any other tips besides the 1/4 resolution?

Thanks so much!

Martin

– MacPro – Quad Core – 4 gig Ram

-MacBook Pro – 2.16GHz Intel Core Duo – 2 gig Ram

-FCP Studio 5.1.4 – QT 7 – OSX 10 – Firmtek Sata Raid- G-raid dv drive

[Nicholas Rivero]

It’s not real time by any means but we have been working fine at quarter res and doing ram previews between an 1/8 res and 1/4 res; obviously with no motion blur or frame blending, just basic enough that we can build camera moves, looks, the large scale things. Our tour consists of about 4 hours worth of content. The longest pieces are just under 10 minutes and range down to about 30 seconds.

The most complex piece we built was a 3D hallway in which the camera flies through some Trapcode Particular clouds.

It’s not ideal but it is possible.

//nick

[Bob Bonniol]

OK,

So your original full native pixel res (3500×1050) is a rectangle roughly expressed as a 10 (wide) by 3 (high) (or 10:3 as a divisible aspect ratio). HD is native at 1920 x 1080 or as After Effects see’s it 32:27 (let’s just say around 16:9). That 10:3 ratio rectangle is WAY wider. So horizontally speaking when you squish it into an anamorphic frame you are interpolating pixels into less pixels in the width axis. The Montage is then “making up” information when it interpolates those pixels back out to the natural width.

It makes things that are vector based look jaggy, it makes color potentially go weird, it can make things with lots of horizontal motion go weird.

It would be better to playback off 3 HD machines, splitting the comp into 3 parts that fit neatly (and WITHOUT anamorphising) into HD (1920 x 1080) (sort of as described in the previous post).

The montage then stitches these back together, and no pixels are lost.

That post also brought up an interesting question. Blending or not. Will the 3 projectors be used with their rasters butted up, or will projector blending be used ? When blending, it is good to plan on using 15% to 20% of the raster on either side to be used to blend the rasters.

I’ve pounded stuff bigger than your 3500×1050 through AE, both on my quad G5 and my MacBook Pro, and it’s really not necessarily a problem. Unless the gig is like, next week, in which case if you are just discovering what your blended raster is going to be, then you are in for a tough two weeks.

I hope not !

Bob

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

[Dave Martin]

Sounds like it’ll take some time!

Thanks Nick!

Dave Martin

– MacPro – MacBook Pro –

[Dave Martin]

Thanks Bob

This makes perfect sense and I will see if we can arrange extra HD playback. I believe there will be three projectors with a blend of 350 pixels.

I guess either way it won’t effect my workflow though will it? I’ll work in 3500 x 1080 in After Effects and just crunch through it.

Would you have any other design tips? I understand we don’t want to use solid colors (movement in the background is good for the blend) and I shouldn’t use pure white or black in the background.

I’m thinking I should design in a low rez (1000 x 300?)comp…get approvals and then rebuild…would that make sense? Things I should keep in mind?

Thanks so much for your help Bob…

Dave Martin

– MacPro – MacBook Pro –

[Dave Martin]

Oh…and I have 1 1/2 months so that’s good! 😎

Dave Martin

– MacPro – MacBook Pro –

[Ryan Hodges]

i think youll find you can do just about anything you want with video walls using renewedvision.com’s software. i use it to feed a wall of 30 50″ plasmas hi-def .mov’s that i make in premier pro and you can split it any way you want with the software, it really beats anything else you can find.