Wide Format Video Walls – up to 28 screens wide

[Thomas Leong]

1. What playback software did you have in mind? Anything like Dataton’s Watchout or AvStumpfl’s Wings Platinum 4? Watchout v5 is capable of 6 screens per licence, Wings’ max is 4 screens per licence…correction, 4 screens per PC (needs a 4-channel licence in the one PC for Wings). Both use a basic network of computers to get more screens for simultaneous controlled programming and playback.

2. As for the object/animal moving across screens, it would depend on the object/animal. For example, if a domesticated animal (or well trained wild animal!!), one idea would be to shoot it on a treadmill that can be keyed out, then pan the animal across the screens over a background that is panning the other direction. Such background can be a stitched panoramic still pix treated with Photoshop’s horizontal blur. Composite in After Effects or the aforementioned playback software.

3. With AE, as you said yourself, you would have to split out the various files for playback. With Watchout or Wings, the required splits are done by the control program (They call it Production PC or Master PC respectively), and instructions sent to the Display/Slave networked PCs to each display their respective portions. Makes life easier.

[Tina O’donnell]

Thank you so much for your response. We are using playback software similar to Watchout. Our main concern is prior to playback. That was a good idea by the way…unfortunately our client wanted a Wolf…we won’t be doing that because of budget but immediately I could see the problem of how to work on the “entire 28 x 2 screens as one canvas… When we work on 10 monitors across we create our “canvas” as one piece which we render and then split up for playback. This enables us not to have to worry so much about continuity from monitor to monitor. FOr example, if you throw water so it will go across all 10 screens you can do it. But I have a feeling – and please if you have a great a idea about this – that we wont be able to do this if we have to pre-split the canvas into 3 sections to enable us to work on it in after effects… I hope this makes sense..

[Thomas Leong]

Not an expert with After Effects, but I think its limit is 30,000×30,000pixels for one canvas, whereas Watchout, if I’m not wrong, does not have such a limit since it uses its own cut-down rendered visuals representing the originals for production, and then distributed computing and proprietary caching for final display out to the monitors.

Re your playback system, can it also be used for production? On the other hand, if it is digital signage system, then yea, it is probably limited to playback only.

Budget permitting, the only other way I can think of is an animated 3D wolf since today’s 3D software are pretty realistic with hair, etc. Rendered with alpha-channel, compositing with a moving background is the other problem. The moving background could be obtained with vReveal, which can create an auto stitched panoramic still from a panned video. Distortion by stretching the result to fill the required monitors should not be a problem since it is meant to be blur anyway. Next problem is to render out the multiple files for your playback system, and with this comes the compensation-for-bevel-width-between-monitors. If the budget is not there, I’d tell client it is do-able but not viable.