[Thomas Leong]

Bob,

I agree that one should ideally have matched units for the reasons you gave. However, it is still good to know that non-matched units are still ok with Wings, other things being equal…because one may start with a basic setup of 2-3 displays, then add more units later rather than having to buy from scratch again. In a limited budget environment (like with Asian clients!) that is an alternative. Not all of us get paid in US$, Euros or Yen! 🙂 [Don’t laugh too hard, but back in ’98, I was ‘paid’ in US$10,000 equivalent of shampoo, talcum powder and trousers!…the client was going bankrupt, and asked us to drive the van to his backdoor before the bank came!]

George,
There is a cheaper version of multidisplay based on PCs, Visual Basic 5, and a dongle for each node. It is made in England by a good friend of mine. Its main weakness is that it is not frame accurate…i.e. sync between nodes drift over time and could be anything like a second or more out at the end. So, if the production you are planning does not require exact frame-sync (such as 3 related non-panoramic videos in a 3-screen config), this may suit. Not exactly sure of costs, but I think it is about 400 British pounds per node inclusive of PC, Win98, the VB5 application, and the dongles. Let me know, and I’ll put you in touch. Far as I know, there are two sets currently running – one at a small museum here in Malaysia on the first Prime Minister of my country, and the other at the Malaysian Pavilion at the current World Expo in Japan.

Thomas

[Thomas Leong]

I’d like to…er…correct one fact and add others re Bob’s comments on Wings.

First, the Master can also be a Slave for playback. This saves one licence cost, compared to Watchout.

Therefore, for a 3-processor/3-screen Display, you only need a minimum of 3 licences, not 4, where the Master/Control is used to program/preview the timeline, etc…then when ready for multidisplay playback, just hook up two slaves, and use TCP/IP addressing of Displays 1, 2 and 3 (addressed to Master PC1, Slave 1 PC2, and Slave 2 PC3), saving one licence. Of course, if one can afford it, 4 licences is the ideal way to go, keeping the Master as Master.

Additionally, for final presentation purposes, the recommendation is to render the whole timeline to video files and put them into Presentation Tracks in the timeline. These tracks take precedence over all other visual media tracks, unless manually switched off. Presentation Tracks therefore essentially contain rendered videos split according to the Display assigned. This way, the playback PCs are merely playing back video files (AVI, WMV, or MPEG2), and these do not put much stress on today’s PCs.

The Master (as Slave) is still present running the timeline during presentation where ‘Markers’ for pause, run, jump to a position, etc…will still control the presentation, and the main audio will be played from the Master’s output channels.

Furthermore, I understand that PCs with different configurations could be put together to run a Wings multidisplay show. Not substantially, way out configs, but there is no requirement for all PCs to be absolutely identical. Apparently, Wings will cater for the differences even during realtime preview in multidisplay mode as long as the Timeline’s Synchronisation is set to Audio inside Wings’ timeline settings (a default option actually).

What this also means is that IF you do not require realtime 3d rendering for preview on the slave PCs during programming, these Slave PCs do not need to be fitted with the higher end 3D graphics cards (eg. ATI Radeon 9600 and up). Lower setup and playback costs! The onboard graphics will suffice (eg. Intel Extreme Graphics, etc) as long as you have suffient RAM to share…since onboard gfx almost always use shared RAM.

A production house from Singapore has such a setup (using onboard graphics) currently running in the Singapore Pavilion at the World Expo in Japan, morning to night.

Thomas Leong

[Thomas Leong]

hi,

I’m not familiar with Pinnacle nor Matrox, but Canopus has DV Capture which permits capturing 3 simul DV streams (your harddisk sub-system permitting).

For this, you need the Canopus DVStorm2 capture card for one of the streams. (However, DVStorm2 is now officially obsolete, but Ebay might have it, or the ‘Marketplace’ section at the Canopus Forums. Its replacement is the Edius NX for HDV. The DV Capture Utility comes with the package, otherwise downloadable from Support.)

The 2nd and 3rd streams are from an IEEE 1394 OHCI card in your system with multiple firewire connections. I haven’t tried it with built-in IEEE 1394 OHCI. Only tried it with a PCI OHCI card and my DVStorm2.

For simul playback, a reasonably good graphics card (eg. the ATI Radeon 9600XT or equiv.) with dual head should be able to playback using software overlay two instances of Windows Media Player or equiv., one on each monitor without much problems. BUT…your audio will be mixed unless you can assign audio from one player to one sound card’s output, and audio from the second player to a second audio card’s output within the same PC.

That’s going to be difficult without specialist software such as Wings Platinum Module Version which, apart from a whole host of other things, allows you to so assign, both your audio and video outputs, simultaneously, especially when used with other PCs configured as Slaves of the Master PC.

A possible alternative is a hardware playback solution using the SC Video Player (Dual Player version) also from Stumpfl.

Thomas Leong

[Thomas Leong]

Hi Bob,

Done.
I made a guess at the email address and hope it is correct, else I’ll have to try another. Otherwise email me at tlsc ‘at’ pc.jaring.my

I haven’t tried the mesh feature myself, but the full res preview is more than that.

My first (and only…yikes!) job was a two-screen thing, agency pitch job for peanuts, and their client gave them only 5 mins to set up and present, so the alternative output option offered by Wings to render to DVD and burn solved it without re-editing on an NLE, etc. With Watchout, my Hong Kong associate does a camera capture from the projection on the wall straight to his DVD desktop burner…ok for preview with a good camera.

There’s another one feature I have yet to try (version 2.20g) – specifying a backup Master via the TCP/IP…if it is what I think it is, Watchout has yet to come up with such a feature.

Overall, the price is less than Watchout, and with the Euro dropping, that’s another incentive.

Thomas

[Thomas Leong]

For exercise, I just rendered out a Digital Juice 720×486 30fps Jumpback to uncompressed avi, took that into After Effects and stretched it into a 3920×1024 comp (since Wings Platinum does not do XY non-proportionate stretching…yet) and rendered that out to another uncompressed avi. Imported the AE result into Wings Platinum setup with a 4-Display size of 3920×1024 (1280×1024 individuals, with 400-pixel overlaps), and viewed just one full-screen area playback from one 2.8GHz P4 Slave Display with ATI9600XT 128MB, and it looked pretty acceptable as a moving background thingy. No visible pixels, image is enlarged of course, and has some blurring, but with a title such as ‘Cosmic Rays and all that’, it wouldn’t be sharp anyway.

Total time about 1 hour. With repetitions, should be less than 1/2 hour for each Digital Juice Jumpback. So you could do a few by this weekend. Each jumpback is about 30secs. and you could loop them butt-to-butt on the timeline or with a dissolve. With the supplied Juicer from Digital Juice, you can colorise the clip before you render out. So one clip source can become ‘many’.

Thomas Leong

[Thomas Leong]

Alexx,

Going to be hard to get. Best of luck.

You should specfy the size of your final pano – 1920×1280, or what? I’ve stretched some Digital Juice 720×576 Jumpbacks to 1400×600 in Wings Platinum without any noticeable increase in pixelation. I’ll have to try them on a 1920×1280 format.

With a specified pano size, suggest you also try posting the request in the Cow After Effects Forum. Those guys are quite brilliant, and could quickly probably whip up a AE project with the right plug-in to get some space effects (eg. infinite travelling stars in a loop, etc.) and you could pay for the AE project file, and do the render yourself.

I also believe one of the Cow AE Forum visitors is from NASA and uses AE to generate NASA’s visuals of space flights, planets, etc. Maybe he could help.

Also, I’ve emailed you an invite to post at my Yahoo multidisplay forum primarily for Stumpfl Wings users and dealers, including some from Stumpfl themselves.

Thomas Leong

[Thomas Leong]

Look up https://www.analogway.com for their Graphic Switcher II with their Widescreen AddOn, etc….you can download .pdfs showing example diagrams on the combination of Graphic Switcher IIs required depending on the number of screens you are projecting to. The downloads are somewhere on their site, if they have not changed their policy.

Also, go through https://www.widescreensolutions.com/wsmainframe.html
They use some other system. Perhaps Folsom and Extron have their own hardware options as well.

For software options, there are AVStumpfl’s Wings Platinum with the TV/Video Module and Dataton’s Watchout with a third-party VNC software add-on. Both require a WDM-compatible video capture card installed in each of the Slave/Display PCs. Both are meant for timeline (pre-programmed/pre-planned) playback, so might not be what you want, although each has the option to program/insert a jump to any other part of timeline allowing you to program a jump to a section(s) for live video(s), and jump back to pre-prepared graphics that loop. Matter of design, and preparation.

Thomas Leong

[Thomas Leong]

Cheaper alternatives are –
1. Springboard retaining the pencil and paper style at US$30; and

2. Storyboard Tools at BP30

Apologies, haven’t used them myself.

Thomas Leong

[Thomas Leong]

Yes.

You won’t have any hue controls working in PAL mode anyway.
And for PAL, the color bar chart should not have any grey gradations in the lower third, right corner as in NTSC. It is one big black, or as in the example PAL bitmap at videouniversity’s site shows, one big red.

My own method is less sophisticated, but IMO still as effective. I eyeball my tuning, as follows –

Bearing in mind that TV originated from B&W and color came later, I first zero all color controls. Then turn down the contrast control to zero as well. Next the brightness control is tuned till I get some kind of a faint picture. Contrast is then added to achieve a good B&W with details in the shadows. Best to use a video image or still frame for this – one that has highlights and shadows – rather than the color bars. Remember the objective is to get a good B&W picture. When done, I then add color to my satisfaction, i.e. where skin tones are not too reddish, but just about right. The color bars are then used to check my settings.

With NTSC and its different hues, the color adjustment is more critical. With PAL, we just don’t have those problems.

Of course, if you have a vectorscope and waveform hooked up, you could use those to check as well: vectorscope for color, waveform for luminance (blacks & whites).

ThomasLeong

[Thomas Leong]

Look at Color Bars and How To Use ’em

For PAL, just ignore the lower third and any hue adjustments.

ThomasLeong