[Thomas Leong]

Hello,

For starters, look at –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_effect

Also,
https://www.projectorpeople.com/resources/keystone-correction.asp

Hope that gets you started.

[Thomas Leong]

Have a look at VideoMill for multiple video playback with one button ‘Play’ using its ‘Media Group’ feature, and individual video playback control without.

Shareware pricing.

[Thomas Leong]

Have a look at Pixelwix Studio Software, probably with the Cat-5 capture of another PC in order to include Powerpoint.

It does not seem to auto into a quad output, but I guess one could create quadrants for each media…just a guess, I don’t have the software.

[Thomas Leong]

Pardon me chipping in here.

Glass has 2 surfaces. The ghosting comes from the back surface. This is partly the reason for using silver-surfaced/front-surfaced mirrors, apart from improving reflectivity.

Try using a thinner piece of glass and increasing the contrast of your monitor. Careful though. Thin glass is brittle. You may want to frame it with ‘C’ channel aluminum for easier handling.

[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.

[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.

[Thomas Leong]

Mmm…quite a bit there. I’m not conversant with Playback Pro, Spyder nor Encore, so I’ll leave that section to others, and deal with “The Small Screen” section.

Basically, don’t even think of a screen blend for this. For a 1080 pixel height video to get up to 15ft screen height, the 1920 pixels of width will reach 26.75ft anyway (the ratio of the video does not change) so any blend with a second projector will be at about 100%!! To use blend, you would have to use projectors that are not natively 1920×1080, eg. XGA 1024×768 with 678 pixels of overlap for the blend area to get your 26.75’x15′ projection [((2×1024)-678)=1370. 1370/768 = 1.78 a 16:9 ratio]. But this would effectively mean projecting with lower resolution projectors and some loss of quality.

Your best bet is to hire a HD projector with a wide angle lens of at least 0.7:1, preferably 0.5:1 or 0.6:1 if these exist. At 0.7:1, you shall need a distance of about 18.x ft distance and this excludes the space the projector will take up. A possible solution is to use a front-surfaced mirror mounted on a rigid backing to extend the projection distance if you cannot get more than 18ft from the room. Some HD projectors with inter-changeable lenses are Christies, Projection Design, Sanyo and possibly Panasonic. Look for a rental company that has these and the lens.

One projector (with a mirror) will have less headaches and alignment problems.

Brightness? Depending on room size and ambient light, I’d guess minimum 10K ANSI lumens or more.

Switcher? Probably not if Playback Pro itself can switch between logo and the HD video without a glitch. Else, you would need a seamless switcher for glitch free switching, or a switcher with a graphic capture and memory where a static logo can be stored in memory and recalled at will. Analog Way and Extron are such switchers in mind.

Thomas Leong

[Thomas Leong]

If the original was for Brightsign players, production was done on something else, like After Effects, also maybe Digital Fusion, or Dataton Watchout or AvStumpfl Wings Platinum, the latter two being specialist multidisplay software.

For file splitting, which Brightsign players require, Wings Platinum has in-built output options to output to individual displays either as .mov, .avi, wmv or mpeg2 formats. BrightAuthor, a free software from Brightsign, would then be used to author the necessary files into SD/SDHC Flash cards for the various Brightsign players, and sync them all via Ethernet link for playback with the first player being the Master from which the others would take their ‘cue’ from –
https://www.brightsign.biz/tutorials.php#MultiSynch

If you only have After Effects, the splits can be chosen through Make Movie > Render Settings where you can crop parts of the whole composition to the various multiple files for each Brightsign player to handle.

In the example you showed, the whole comp is likely to be a rectangular area which includes the hollow under the ‘arch’. On output to the various files, just do not output the parts where the hollow is. Obviously, the comp has to be a resolution where the individual parts match the total combined res of the plasma monitors being used.

[Thomas Leong]

Here are some alternatives to try with the software you have been using to see if those software will extend to a 3rd or 4th monitor –

1. Displaylink Technology
https://www.displaylink.com/technology/technology_overview.php

2. MaxiVista Multi-Monitor software
https://www.maxivista.com/multi-monitor-software.htm

3. VTBook Multidisplay for Notebooks
https://www.villagetronic.com/vtbook/index.html

You mentioned that the T420 can use its own LCD screen plus 2 external monitors. That is unusual for a notebook. What sort of connections does the T420 have to connect to external monitors? DVI, VGA, HDMI and/or Display port? Do these allow simultaneous connections and discrete displays – i.e. different content to each output – or are they mirrors of each other’s content?

[Thomas Leong]

Walter,

Wings originally began as a slideshow programmer – a’la AVL, Electrosonics and Dataton – with the added capability to output a slideshow into a digital file. The bulk of its market, if I’m not wrong, still are stills photographers who want slide projector control capabilities, digital slideshows, etc. Multi-display and Show Control features were added later, so the color management feature must have been there for a while. I’d have to load up version 1.0 to confirm, but I started with version 2.0. Might have v1 Demo somewhere in the cabinet.

Thomas