garageCube

[DudeoftheDunes]

Hi,

I've only started using mapmapper, quartzcomposer and the likes, played around with it for a bit and I feel sorta ready to start using it professionally. I have been a lightoperator/engineer for some years now and it only feels natural to expand my business to videa and projections as lot's of lighting consoles now support videocontrol (grand MA2/Chamsys MagicQ definetly do, and that's what I use primarily) over ethernet protocols. Recently I have gained a pretty large club as a new customer and I'm pretty excited about the place. The place has a pretty high ceiling and they have an ugly grayish wall all the way round. In some light conversation I had with the club's owner he told me he was planning to paint the wall in some "nice" visual graphics.
I told him about the possibility to project video onto the wall instead (the light grey wouldn't even have to be painted I think it'll be perfect). He was pretty enthusiastic about the plan and now I am here
To be honest I wouldn't really know what kind of hardware I'd need to make a continous edgeblended projection with 10 beamers. I know I need:

-at least 3 matrox triplehead (is that enough?)

- a good Mac with possibly external graphicscard or a mac workstation with extra graphics cards. What kind of processing power do I need and does anybody have experience with these kinds of set ups? I don't want too much lag or framedrop. 2 frames is acceptable I guess.

- a scanconverter

The beamers are already bought they are WXGA beamers, dunno exactly which ones, but I can find out if it is of importance.

So I was wondering if you guys could help me a good deal into the right direction.

[eddee76]

You need more then just a reply on a forum.
You need a plan.

[Xaver2k]

i´m not sure if you can connect 10 beamers/displays to a single mac. as i know even the newer mac pro can handle up to 6 displays it´s a limitation of the thunderbolt bus, i´m not sure how it will look like with the matrox triple htg 3x3=9, but at least the rendering capacity should be fully occupied and maybe the mac is not capable of doing any quartz composer live rendering or stuff like this. maybe you should think about a 2mac (both with at least dual graphiccard) setup, to ensure to have enough rendering power. Or if possible for your project just use bigger and less beamers. what do you mean with 2 frames are accetable? do you even now what that mean, you need at least 25-30 frames per second to get a smooth and non laggy video. or do you want to project a fixed image. sorry but i think you need much more background information than just playing around a little bit with the software to say you can do it professional now.

[franz]

9 beamers is a lot.
While it "should" work with 3 triple heads on a latest mac pro, I wouldn't expect decent performance from this setup.
I've already, successfully, connected 6x fullHD outputs from a MacPro (+1 monitor), but it was already on the limit, performance wise.
Depending on your content I would suggest using 2 macpros, connected via midi for instance. Although it might be a problem to keep one big media in sync across all the machines.
And I don't even talk about edge blending. For 9 beamers I would personally avoid edge blending - it just adds up to the gamma, so with 9 beamers you end up with gray blacks.
To put it simply: I'd strongly recommend making a test setup before selling the project to your client.

[sigmasix]

it's actually possible with a lot of pain…
http://sigmasix-lab.tumblr.com/post/110 ... or-massive

but to be honest, to have it stable it's only 4x 2400x600 res… we managed to have 4x 3072x768 but very unstable and we didn't want to have a crash on a 6h vj set…

Anyway, I would not recommend this for a serious and pro contract

[Xaver2k]

@sigmasix hahahah Nice Tape Setup! but still some danger signs missing

[sigmasix]

there was a written warning on the tape

[ProjectileObjects]

I would say build a PC and start using Touch Designer