Video System Setup

[patrickh]

A small theatre company is currently doing a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in an old church. The designer's goal is project watercolor paintings on the walls. We can do coverage with 3 projectors and we would use Qlab 3 Pro to push video through a Mac Mini. The issue I am is having is that we need the video outs to support the three projectors. I have considered the Matrox TripleHead2Go but it is bit outside of our budget for this. I was hoping to find a MiniDisplay Port to Dual HDMI or a Thunderbolt to some sort of external video card. I am trying to think creatively to find a solution for this before resulting to chopping the design up. Any suggestions would be helpful. I do have access to a couple of extra PC computers that through OSC it might be possible to drive one projector from each with the Mac running QLab and driving one projector and pushing OSC to the other computers to drive them but that would require a bit of finagling since they don't have the possibility for dual monitors.

 

[ThomasL]

Apologies, not familiar with the Mac mini, but what display port output does it have - mini, or full size? My guess would be mini from the size of the Mac mini. In which case, you would need a mini-DP to full-sized DP adapter for a Display Port Hub which takes one DP in, and spits out to 3 Display Ports. Average price is about USD100.

Next question is whether the Qlab3 Pro can output to 3 discrete displays.

Footnote: If you do decide to go the Display Port Hub route, be aware that the one sold by Club3D was reported by a couple of users as inconsistent in outputs. The one from EVGA was reportedly better in output consistency.

ThomasL

 

[patrickh]

Apologies, not familiar with the Mac mini, but what display port output does it have - mini, or full size? My guess would be mini from the size of the Mac mini. In which case, you would need a mini-DP to full-sized DP adapter for a Display Port Hub which takes one DP in, and spits out to 3 Display Ports. Average price is about USD100.

Next question is whether the Qlab3 Pro can output to 3 discrete displays.

Footnote: If you do decide to go the Display Port Hub route, be aware that the one sold by Club3D was reported by a couple of users as inconsistent in outputs. The one from EVGA was reportedly better in output consistency.

ThomasL

It does indeed have a mini display port. I will look into the Hub! Qlab can support the projectors. The projectors will be edge blended to create one surface.

 

[Joshualangman]

If you can get a retina MacBook Pro, the computer natively has three video outputs.

 

[ruinexplorer]

Are these still images or video clips that you wish to play? The reason I ask is that the Mac Mini doesn't have a discrete graphics card, thus requiring the CPU to process all of the graphics. The same will happen with an external video card, though you will then also need to deal with the USB transfer rate.

You might be able to find a used Matrox which would make your life considerably easier.