[Thomas Leong]

It is based on the maths principle “Angle of Inflection equals Reflection”.

Essentially, the video animations are created over a layer of an outline of the bottle. When done, this bottle layer is not rendered. When the rendered animation is played back in the manner shown (reflected, in this case, at a 45-degree angle since the monitor is horizontally flat at the top of the ‘box’ housing), the eye sees the animation exactly over and ‘around’ a real physical bottle placed behind the one-sided silver-surfaced mirror. The position of the real bottle is equidistant to the monitor above – angle of inflection equals reflection.

[Thomas Leong]

Just a suggestion for you to try for next year: Dataton Watchout.

Works on a node basis: Master controlling Slave Display(s). The Master is called the Production PC, and this is where all work is done. To connect to Display PCs one needs a licence each for the Production and Display PC. However, the ‘demo’ is fully operational (save, etc.) without the need for a USB licence key except for networked fullscreen display to the Display PC(s). Alternative, of course, is rental (hint: Walter has the system and licences).

It is a both a media player/server and realtime multi-layered compositor with blend modes so try using the blend mode ‘screen’ or ‘multiply’ to your keynote files and the motion background should be visible through the elements in your keynote file. The realtime compositing/playback comes from using the power of the graphics card, so no rendering is required.

Thomas Leong

Edit:
Forgot to mention that the Keynote would have to be captured in via a capture card as ‘Live Video’ in Watchout with eg. Datapath, Magewell or Decklink capture card, or as a ‘Computer Screen’ via Ethernet link which needs vnc to be installed in the Keynote computer.

[Thomas Leong]

This old ‘how to’ video may be relevant to your questions (have not tried myself) –

How to setup a hybrid ATI/nVidia computer for Octane Render

good luck!
Thomas Leong

[Thomas Leong]

The way I see it, you would create a comp of 2597×1080, and output from this 3-4 files for them as follows –

1. For the first file, in Render Queue, crop the left by 677 pixels to get an output of 1920×1080 (1920+677=2597)
2. For the second file, in Render Queue, crop the right by 677 pixels to get 1920×1080.
3. Output also a full comp resolution file (2597×1080) in case their playback pc and software can do the above left/right split itself (eg. Dataton Watchout)
4. Additional option is to output a reduced resolution file without changing the screen ratio of 2.4:1 as a representation/sample of your full res file. Some software may use this as a ‘proxy’ of what goes to the big screen, eg. 1728×720 which maintains the screen ratio of 2.4:1.

Outputting 1 & 2 above is easy with H264, MPEG2 or other codecs since 1920×1080 is standard.
Outputting the full comp of 2597×1080 may be a problem since 2597 is not easily divisible by 4 or 16 without a remainder, as required for most codecs. You can try HAP as .mov file, in particular HAPQ at say Quality setting of 0 https://github.com/vidvox/hap-qt-codec/releases/

The maths, based on the assumption the native resolution of each output (projector) is 1920×1080 –
1. Two projectors each at 1920×1080 are required to achieve a total of 2597×1080 blended.
2. The blend is 65% or 1243 pixels, calculated as follows :
Total width of screen in pixels = (Projector Width x Number of Projectors) – Required Blend between 2 projectors
i.e. 2597 = (1920 x 2) – 1243
3. Therefore, required Comp crop left or right is 1920-1243=677 pixels.

Hope that explains it!
Thomas Leong

[Thomas Leong]

[Sascha Hoffmann] “What happens, if you you make a text box /bounding box with the text tool first, then typing in the text (word) and then apply the mask/path?”

I tried, and get what you get – text is aligned not from the base line, but from the top line.

To get baseline alignment, do not create a text box.
Either –
a) select T from the menu, and type the text in the comp; OR
b) insert a Text Layer, and type the text in the comp

Then,
– draw your path (seems more logical left-right than right-left);
– select Mask 1 as the Mask/Path

[Thomas Leong]

Your most cost effective option to expand monitors is to get an AMD Firepro graphics card with enough oomph for the job (or nVidia Quadro equivalent). I would suggest at least a W7100, preferably a W8100 for better cooling. Both cards allow you up to 4 monitors using ACTIVE DP-DVI Adapters (please note the emphasis on ‘ACTIVE’ when connecting to greater than 2 monitors).

Current technology from AMD (and possibly nVidia but I’m not so familiar with nVidia) allow a max of 6 monitors per pc. To get 6 with a W7100 or W8100, you can use a Display Port MST hub (multi-stream technology) such as that from EVGA, Matrox, Club3D (not recommended), and others. Cost is around USD100, not much more unless they package with software that adds more functionality/features and charge a premium for that).

Good luck with your project!

[Thomas Leong]

Yes, it is that simple. For a steady shot coverage, use a tripod.

[Thomas Leong]

‘Best’ is a relative word, so here is what seems to be the Best –

‘The MSI GT80S, the successor to the highly rated GT80 Titan. This one comes with a full Cherry MX Brown mechanical keyboard and not one, but two 8GB GTX 980 GPUs in SLI, powering an 18.4-inch 1080p display. You will also find an Intel Core i7 6920HQ Skylake CPU under the hood, along with 32GB of DDR4 RAM, a 1TB HDD and four 256GB PCIe SSDs in RAID 0 for super fast operation.

Price is £3989.99. Available for pre-order at Overclockers UK.’

For AE use, break up the 4 SSDs in RAID 0 and use only 2 SSDs in RAID 0. 512GB in RAID 0 should be plenty for OS and programs. Use one of the remaining 2 for AE’s cache, and the other for archive/library/backups/rendered data.

And if the motherboard can accept it, might as well go for broke, and up the DDR4 RAM from 32GB to 64GB if the sticks and slots are available.

[Thomas Leong]

I’d like to chip in my two cents here to point out a feature-wise competitive motherboard to the ASUS X99-E WS, and that is the ASRock X99 Extreme 11.

Granted the ASRock does not have 7 PCIe x16 slots. It has 5, and similar to the ASUS, 4 are x16 lanes when all 4 are occupied mainly owing to the 2 PLX PEX 8747 embedded chips (which I suspect the ASUS also has though not mentioned by ASUS).

For storage, I would think the ASRock offers superior features in that there are 2 x 32Gb/s M.2 slots (though they share PCIe lanes with a SATA3 connector when occupied) versus 1 similar speed M.2 slot for the ASUS. Additionally, the ASRock has 18 x SATA3 (8 x SAS3 12.0 Gb/s + 10 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s versus the ASUS 8 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s).

In summary then, both boards support Xeon processors, can cater to 4-way Crossfire or SLI, have 12K hour capacitors and if I’m not wrong both are 12-phase Power Designs for smooth power delivery at low temps. But the ASRock has more high-speed storage features than the ASUS.

Thomas Leong

[Thomas Leong]

Looking at the images you posted, the preview cursor is positioned at the 0 time mark where no images are possible. Just move it forward in the timeline.