[Thomas Leong]

Hi,

4. Do you guys build your video projects at 1024 x 768 and playback through VGA in a laptop?

I don’t know about this yet. I’m going to try to playback out of Premiere CS3 to firewire and then upconvert to 1024 x 768.

If the above does not work for you owing to some latency/delay introduced, then suggest you have a look at the Basic version of Wings Platinum from AvStumpfl. This is the free version (only needs registration); meant for single screen simple fullscreen presentations with realtime rendering via a PC’s graphics card. A high-end 3rd party card is not an absolute necessity as recently, I’ve seen the program output XGA resolution to a XGA-native projector from a laptop that has the on-board Intel graphics chip. The guy had 4GB of RAM in his laptop though!…again, IMO, not a necessity. 1-2GB of RAM will do fine.

Thomas Leong

[Thomas Leong]

Ahh…Mac-based. You did not mention that in the beginning.

Have a look at the $10 Keyshowx which is supposed to remote control multiple Powerpoint or Keynote presentations on multiple Macs (trial download available). So perhaps if you have a video from within Keynote on each Mac, then remote trigger all using KeyShowx from another Mac. For $10, cost effective would be an understatement!

Again, if you need frame-sync accuracy across the network, that’s another kettle of fish.

Thomas

[Thomas Leong]

This question has been asked a few times at Show-Control Yahoo Group. Just do a search for ‘syncing multiple DVD players’ there or ‘sync multiple videos’.

There are some solutions to sync multiple DVD players, but it would seem that all of them require an appropriate DVD player (notably from Pioneer), not your usual $100 consumer stuff. Check out –
Dave Jone Design plus his Synchronizing Tutorial for some insights.
Polydvd
and Alcorn McBride

An alternative for long-lasting playback with no moving parts is to use compact flash players. Trigger is via a controller with RS-232 or GPIO outputs. Many products out there, but you could check out –

Medeawiz for their DV68 product. Curiously, their site does not list a controller for multiple players, but Pixels, from UK, does list a KPC-2 programmable controller which “enables multiple DV-68 players to be triggered to start playing media together”. (scroll to near bottom of their page).

If you are up to scripting yourself, you could also check out Brightsign but you should also look up their Users Forum to see if there is a solution to start/sync multiple Brightsigns.

There are many others, such as –
Syncmaker Pro – a shareware (Euro 99 per node though); and
DigitalRecall from Australia which offers a free 2-node 800×600 limitation (+other limitations) download for digital signage purposes. I tested this today, and managed to run a different 720×576 video on each of the nodes, with the Master on another pc. However, I did not try to get them frame-synced.

Frame-sync would be something to delve into with Digital Signage solutions if you need such a feature. This frame-synced feature across the network is one of the selling points for Watchout and Wings. Additionally these 2 products are also production capable, so their price reflects accordingly.

I use Wings, and because of the dual outputs of most mid- to top-end graphics cards nowadays, enabling the ‘Multihead mode’ in Wings allows you to output 2 discrete videos from one pc/licence. Also, the Master can be a Playback (Slave/Display) unit. So for 9 screens, in multihead mode, you only require 5 licences/nodes – One Master (Primary monitor to show the Timeline; Secondary will output to 1 of 9 Display Screens whilst the remaining 8 screens come from 4 Slave Licences each outputting to 2 screens using dual-head graphics cards. Of course, your PCs and its hard-disk system must be able to handle two videos simultaneously….but the latest and greatest is not necessary. I did 9 discrete screens as described above with P4 2.8GHZ Intels, each with only 512MB RAM, except for the Master-slave, and ATI 9600XT graphics cards, 2 years ago.

best of luck,
Thomas Leong

[Thomas Leong]

Here my two cents –

There are a few cheap ways to mask off the hard edge of the projected screen area to get rid of that rectangular look even when video black (which is actually greyish) is projected –

1. Tape up the edges of the projector’s lens with gaffer tape, or block the light off at these edges with a book/videotape covers and the like. The closer these ‘mechanical gobos’ are to the lens, the softer the light fall off will be.

2. Wash out the edges with stage lights. Problem is the spill from these lights onto the rest of the screen area.

3. Over project the image, i.e. projected screen area is larger than the physical screen, and wash out the spillover with stage lights. To avoid the flames getting too large to be realistic, you could pre-comp the flames into a larger comp with a black background.

Thomas Leong

[Thomas Leong]

Hi Paul,

Contact me offline and I can provide you with a couple of contacts in London who may be able to help and/or advise re Wings or Watchout.

If you intend to do only multi-screens without soft-edged panoramics, check out the freeware digital signage software from Digital Recall in Australia. It appears to work on the same Master + Slave nodes via TCP/IP principle, but the free version is limited to 800×600 per screen area if I’m not wrong. Upgrading to a higher resolution is relatively cheap though.

Thomas Leong
tleong49 at streamyx dot com

[Thomas Leong]

Datavideo has a mobile studio mixer, the HS-500 (mixer + 2 small monitors) in a suitcase form, but it’s probably more than the $500 budget you have. Perhaps Ebay may have some offers.

Thomas Leong

[Thomas Leong]

Others have done it by –
1. Activating a camera flash at the start of each camera recording; and/or
2. Use an audio signal/blip to indicate start of recording sent to both cameras at the same time.

Then line it up on two tracks in the NLE.

Thomas

[Thomas Leong]

Andy,

AFAIK, using Firewire as the medium, the audio is captured simultaneouslly with the video down the same wire. There is no control over either till after the capture. However, not sure about DVRack though.

Thomas

[Thomas Leong]

I have a question –

Are you sure you are able to create a DVD video file (i.e. DVD compliant MPEG-2 file) with a resolution of 852×480? As I understand it, NTSC’s DVD specs is 720×480 to ensure a desktop player will play the file.

Though I’m in PAL-land, I’ve tried to create a 852×480 test file with DVD specs, and my program which uses Mainconcept’s encoder rejects the creation of such a file since it is a non-compliant MPEG-2 (i.e. not divisible by 16).

Thomas Leong

[Thomas Leong]

No one editor has the same workflow.

So perhaps Tyler’s workflow requires 3 big files that he can edit with. His ‘event’ may merely be a 3-camera view of a single session, and as long as the start points are aligned, a multicam edit generally requires selecting a single camera view at any point in time. No notes required nor breaking up into smaller files before editing.

Or it could be something else.

Thomas