Various Video "talking" to One Another

Eehjeen

Member
So I'll try to explain the best way I understand how this should work.

The idea is to fill the room with video projections/playback. Our setup would be composed of various video playback ( LED Wall, Plasma TVs around the area, and if the venue can accommodate, we'll hang projectors in the way that above the TVs there will also be video playing)
We will only be playing almost the same video for all the screens. I say almost because there will be a part where the person on the video on the LED wall will be talking and the other projector's person will butt in on the far corner of the room, and then another projector's person on the opposite side will also butt in, and while the it is talking, the other screens will be black to give attention to that certain projector This is the part where it gets tricky and I'm having a hard time figuring out how to do it.
I was thinking to just have a different versions of the video to be played simultaneously, but that would require several video playbacks per projectors and tvs, and there's a higher risk of not being played at the same time.
The other option is to have only one version of the video to be played only on one playback and to manually close or turn off the TVs whenever the projector will start to "talk".

Is this possible? What other options do I have?

Thanks a lot!
 
Easiest way to do it would be editing the content properly first, I would get individual media files each on playing on a specific screen that all are synced and fed to a specific television, embedded audio can then be routed from each source video to the appropriate speakers for each display. Though with 4+ screens you're looking at a decent amount of processing power.
 
What I understand is that you have basically three outputs, some of which will need to be muted. Do you know if all three will be the same resolution? If so, you have a few options including using something like Matrox triple head 2 go and then send your three outputs to the required displays and then deal with muting all but three of them for your one scene. That way you have a single playback. Now, if you have a mixture of resolutions, this will become more complicated.
 
As far as I understand you need a couple of players and a show control system. My suggestion is to use the open source software v-control (V-Control | Versatile Open Source Control Solution) to control the players and the Screens and / or a routing switch.

As players you can use an usual PC with VLC video player (videolan.org). You can control vlc by V-Control and send a play command synchronous to a couple of VLC equipped computers. If VLC is suitable depends on how perfect the videos have to be in sync. My expiriennce is that, the longer the video sequence, the higher the chance that the videos run out of sync. You can reduce this risk if you use a high performance PC. If you use a PC that can easyly play 4 HD videos, but playing only one, the risk of asynchonous playback with multiple machines is lower.

To set some screens to black you can:
1. Use the CueUp command and position the VLC Player to a black position in the video
2. Control the projectors shutter and the LED processor or
3. control a routing switch that has all players + one black source as input and all screen on the output.

If synchronization with VLC is insufficient you can use other players such as V-Player, Adtec Edji, Stumpfl Player or whaterver professional syncable player you have access to and control that with V-Control.
 

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