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How to create a panoramic display using 4 HD monitors?
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. I have created the movies in After Effects but I am having playback issues playing them 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?
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 -
2 Replies
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Matrox might have a multi-monitor product you could use.
— Bob C.
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[auguste raffael] “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?”
It may be possible to save the movie as 4 separate 1920 x 1080 movies (H.264 if you have the processor power, if not try PhotoJPEG with quality “10”), and in QuickTime Player (needs to be the Pro version), move the movies to their required windows and use the “Play All Movies” option (I don’t have QT in front of me so I don’t know if that is the right name).
I am not sure if this works in Full Screen mode. If it doesn’t, another alternative is to compress all 4 movies into 4 High Quality MPEG2 files and use VLC (www.videolan.org) to ‘stream’ each of the movies back to the computer, and have each stream displayed on a separate monitor. Because it bypasses QuickTime, you should have enough bandwidth to do the software decompression.
Actually, try opening the 7680 x 1080 file in VLC. It may have to be converted into H.264, DivX or MPEG2 as I don’t think it can handle QuickTime movies, but it may be able to display it across the screens.
When I get home I will run some tests on a dual monitor system to see what works and I’ll get back to you.
Kind regards,
Luke Goddard
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