[Walter Soyka]

Hi Donnie,

I use the same method Dave has described when I’m working on widescreen or multi-screen material in After Effects.

However, if you’ve already got a heap of clips at 5120×768, you could just create a series of 5 presets, one for each projector, for a compression program (like Episode) that performs the crop. This would make it a very simple batch process. Drag, drop, start, and wait.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

Hi Mike,

I’m not sure what’s doing the split in the picture, but I’ve seen this done with a product from Evertz — I think the MVP series.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

Hi Rose,

I would hire a recording engineer — preferably familiar with classical music — without a second thought. Instruments call for specialized mics and recording technique that most of us don’t deal with every day, and a master cellist will want her tone reproduced as faithfully as possible. Your engineer could deal with the venue for you to make sure that the mics and recorder they are providing are appropriate for your needs, and if they are not, make recommendations as to what to use instead.

Good luck with the shoot!

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

Hi Cory,

No need to worry about the frame-accurate sync — you can adjust your content to get around a lack of perfect frame accuracy. If every screen in the room is supposed to cut precisely together, you would notice if a couple screens had drifted a couple frames. If, on the other hand, the cuts are staggered through the room, a couple players could drift without it being noticeable.

On the driving footage, you might want to create a test to make sure the delay will give you the look you need, and make sure that slipping a couple frames won’t harm the illusion.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

The Dave Jones Design synchronizers are rock-solid and a great way to keep the cost of an installation reasonable. A couple notes on these worth repeating:

These units are standard-def only right now.

If you need frame accuracy, you need to use the Pioneer DVD-V8000 with blackburst. The DVD-V5000s are cheaper, but only accurate to within 2 frames. If you plan to have any cuts in your final edited piece, you will want the frame accuracy. If you are only using slow dissolves, perhaps you can get away without it.

DVD players have moving parts, and these will eventually fail. You may want to budget for and purchase a couple spares upfront, so there is no significant downtime in the installation when one of the DVD players fails. This will also increase the longevity of the system as a whole, because you would be able to avoid any problems from mixing different Pioneer models in the same installation.

Some questions similar to this have been asked recently that mention a few other solutions, including solid-state playback systems from Technovision, as well as a range of more expensive networked computer-based playback systems.

Are you shooting this with 12 cameras simultaneously? Your rig for the car must be impressive!

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

Your projector will need to be able to reverse the image to allow for rear projection. Rear projection always creates a hot spot, so if your projector also supports keystone correction, you can place the projector vertically off-axis, moving the hot spot out of the center of the screen.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

This is probably off-topic for this forum, but here’s what to do. Click the Apple in the upper left corner, then “About this Mac.” Next, click the “More Info” button. It will list all the busses under “Hardware” on the left, and you can see what drives are connected to each bus (SCSI, SATA, etc.).

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

Watchout (and Wings, I think) work on a timeline model, so you won’t get program and preview.

ProVideo Player would be more in-line for triggering cues like you describe, but you’d have to build a network of multiple machines to do what you’re looking for.

Spyder is a beautifully-engineered and incredibly powerful system, but for your application, the price tag will shock you. You could consider renting instead of purchasing, and look into a cheaper rental like a ScreenPRO Plus, but it’s not plug and play, and training will be required.

Since you have asked for a software solution, you should probably research VJ software, like Arkaos or VDMX, which is purpose-built for what you’re looking to achieve. Perhaps one of these supports multiple outputs.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

Thomas, I couldn’t agree more on the importance of doing this the right way and using an application explicitly designed for multi-display. To add to your point, we always run a complete second system as backup, with a switching router to allow us to take the backup system immediately to screens, just in case anything goes wrong with the primary system.

Juan, there’s likely no need to purchase any of these systems outright; you should be able to rent them from a local staging company.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

Hi Juan,

This is a tough question to answer without knowing which software you chose, what computers it will run on, and what kind of video it is.

In general, though, I avoid codecs like h264 or WMV9 with high decode complexity on synched systems; I’d rather use a simpler codec like Photo-JPEG or MPEG2 at a higher data rate to reduce the playback burden on the system.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production