Daniel Brodie
Forum Replies Created
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Well, I can tell you for sure that the standard for high end productions in theatre is Dataton Watchout. I have programmed five shows on Broadway that use Watchout, including Rock of Ages, Lombardi, and The Pee-wee Herman Show, all currently running. In addition, Sondheim on Sondheim, which used 54 screens and 10 HD Streams was also used Watchout. Women on the Verge of a Nervous breakdown uses Watchout, the off-broadway show Spirit Control used Watchout. All of this stuff is from 2010.
Other solutions exist, for example American Idiot uses Green Hippo Hippotizer, and Fela! uses the uva d3 system, but Watchout is a large and current presence in professional theatre. The case is certainly not that “they all use media servers now.”
One final note on Qlab. Qlab is not a great solution yet. It is fine for small productions with tight budget limits, but it is not ready for video on a large scale. For audio, there are plenty of Broadway shows that rely on Qlab. One interesting thing that people do with Qlab for video is use one computer as the cue stack, and send MIDI commands to additional computers running Qlab that playback video, one for each video source, sort of like a manually pieced together Watchout system.
Daniel Brodie
https://brodiegraphics.com -
I think this is being overthought. The resolution of the TV will be 1920x1080p. The cheapest Mac Mini will be FINE and so will most new computers. Don’t buy a blackmagic card. You don’t need any fancy capture card, and “graphics cards” are for heavy 3d lifting and processing. You’re just playing a movie file! Just render into h264 and play it in quicktime full screen. A standard computer is not too risky at all, it’s not miraculous, it’s just one video file. Just get a DVI to HDMI cable on Monoprice.com and get whatever DVI adapter you need to connect to your computer.
If you really can’t have the quicktime controls and other associated operating system stuff visible during playback, you can use Keynote to play the video fullscreen on a 1920×1080 slide.
Keep it simple.
Daniel Brodie
brodiegraphics.com -
The professional advice is this: The projector just isn’t really a professional projector. It is never going to look as good as the Cinema Display which is a professional display. You can have the projector color balanced, and you can turn off all the lights, but you’re just never going to make it look as good as it does on the monitor. If you can rent a projector, you should do so. Depending on what city you are in, there are probably numerous video shops to rent it from.
As far as your prores codec goes, I would absolutely convert to h264 for live playback. No one is going to be able to tell the difference in quality, it is going to be absolutely undetectable to the audience, even if you get a brighter projector. Prores is a bulky format that saves most of the quality of the clip for editing purposes and although your computer could probably play it, it isn’t really a playback format.
Export it out of Quicktime as h264, current frames per second, 1920×1080 at 15 Mbps, and that should be fine.
Daniel Brodie
Projection Designer
brodiegraphics.com -
The real way to do this is to use Photoshop to create PSD or PNG files with transparency and do the Text part in Watchout. Just load the text as a file in Watchout, add Opacity tween points to the text layer, and just fade it in and out as needed. Don’t worry about all the encoding settings as much. The good part about this system is that you don’t have to re-render all the footage every time you want to make a change to the text. You just open the file in Photoshop and edit the text.
Daniel Brodie
brodiegraphics.com