Need Advice on MPEG-2 Decoder Card

[Walter Soyka]

Check out Renewed Visions Pro Video Player on the Mac — just what you are looking for.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Thomas Leong]

Ah Mac…yes, Renewed Vision would be your best bet.

BUT…I’m not sure if Renewed Vison would allow the Master to also be the playback presenter. You may need two licences there instead of one as in Wings Platinum, i.e. Master AND SLAVE licences are necessary…implying also two Macs with the Slave being a Mac Mini as a minimum. Best to check.

In the case of the PC-based Wings, you only need one, since the Master can also be used as Slave in a playback situation. Also, a possibly useful feature of Wings for novice operators is that the ‘programmer’ (you??) can use the Control Panel feature (one page will do – available with one of the paid versions) to program triggers into on-screen buttons, i.e. the novice operator does not see the Timeline and other confusing things. He sees only a Control Panel with buttons to ‘Play Video X’, ‘Stop Video X’, Play Video Y’, ‘Stop Video Y’, Pause, etc.

For Mac-based freeware, check out Multiscreener from zachpoff.com plus a few more links from there, eg. Isadora, Max/MSP Jitter. But I think these others are paid-ware.

If you do decide to go with a Windows software, just ensure that it is XP (Home or Pro makes no difference to your presentation), and that it is clean, i.e. little other applications (esp. 3rd party games), and most importantly, NO internet access for that machine. Only then can you be assured of a 101% stable machine for presentation purposes.

Thomas Leong

[Scott Bush]

Thomas thanks, that’s a wealth of info – I’m going to look into that.

Just some more points:

I will likely not be the “programmer” either – I’m really an editor and gfx person, I’ve just been roped into this because my knowledge overlaps a bit, and our head IT guy left a few months ago. Basically what that means is that the programmer, while not a novice, will likely be intermediate at best – a timeline may be more than what we need. The software we used in the past was called “easyplay” and it came with our hardware cards. Something simple (playlist based) like that would be ideal. Everything is already edited, it’s just a big list of MPEG files that need to be put in a specific order. This order, of course, will likely change over and over until the very last minute, so flexibility is key. Something where the order can simply be dragged up and down in a playlist is what I’d like to have.

Thanks for the Windows pointers as well – if we do go windows, we do exactly what you said (although it does have to be networked, if not on the internet).

Thanks again
Scott

[Walter Soyka]

Hi Scott & Thomas,

PVP does allow playback from a single Mac with dual-display support — dual computers & licenses are not necessary.

The interface is really simple, too — you can build or playlist, or you can simply the click the clip you want when you want to play it.

A demo version is available from renewedvision.com if you want to play around with it.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Thomas Leong]

Scott,

I reckon Walter has answered your question – Renewed Vision with one licence, dual-head gfx card, and its playlist feature are all there…within your budget.

cheers,
Thomas

[Scott Bush]

OK so I tried PVP…

And unfortunately, the quality is not up to snuff, and it has some issues playing some of my MPEG-2 files. Particularly, de-interlacing does not appear to work very well with PAL sources, and other applications I tried (VLC, Multiscreener) have much better playback quality. But some of the files simply won’t play at all. Mutiscreener, however, does not have a playlist feature (from what I can tell) and VLC doesn’t really have support – although that may not be an issue. Honestly a lot of these apps look like overkill – I’m going to do some extensive testing with VLC to see if it is stable enough to handle this – any thoughts?

[Walter Soyka]

There’s another virtual VTR program for the Mac called PlaybackPRO. There’s a demo available that you can test with to see if it resolves your quality issues.

The author works in live events, so he understands very clearly what’s required in show. The program supports playlists.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production