This week we will be visiting the set of a theatre production, at the Arts House Meat Market in North Melbourne:
“Arts House is a City of Melbourne contemporary arts initiative. Each year, Arts House presents a curated program of contemporary art, featuring performances, exhibitions, live art, installations and cultural events. Arts House operates across three flexible venues – North Melbourne Town Hall, the Meat Market and the Warehouse. It provides well-equipped, well-maintained spaces, which are well-supported by technical and creative staff.”
One of the interesting aspects of the video in the production is the sequenced use of 3 projectors.
Hardware for splitting signals:
Connecting to multiple screens / projectors from a single computer – can be done using external devices such as the Matrox Triple Head to Go card, which will divide for example – a very wide video sent from a single computer such as 2400×600 – onto 3 separate screens of 800×600. The more expensive Datapath X4 will send video to 4 separate screens, and includes a range of cropping and alignment features.
There are also a growing range of media servers dedicated to splitting signals onto different displays ( eg the Green Hippo ).
Software for splitting signals:
Most VJ software today is capable of outputting wide images which can be broken up onto different screens. I am using Resolume and VDMX on 2 separate machines for this theatre production, and sending those into Madmapper for precise alignment. Millumin is an interesting related app, in development. Aside from those, there are a few industry standards used:
Dataton Watchout – A PC based platform for controlling video across multiple displays simultaneously.
QLab – Mac based software for controlling multimedia events and installations. “QLab allows you to control audio, video, and MIDI from a single workspace.”