VGA
31st August 2006, 05:12 PM
Hello there,
Well not last saturday but the one before, the 19th of August, I had the pleasure of VJ'ing at The Slackers Convention with a freshly minted copy of OpenTZT, adapted by the venerable VJ Esotic to run at a resolution of 800x300 of your common square computer pixels, spread over two desktops each running at 800x300, thus creating a lovely 8:3 aspect ratio. It was great! Heres how it went down :
Hardware
Desktop PC
- Asus P5WD2-E Premium with Intel Penitum D 820 @ 3Ghz
- 2 x Radeon X1600XT graphics cards
- 1gig ram, 300gb HD, moose, keyboard, 19inch monitor.
- 2 x viewsonic projectors (2000lumen / max res 800x600)
- 1 dvd player
- 1 dell laptop (coreduo thing with radeon x1300)
- 1 old video mixer with dual composite outputs
- A remote control for the beamers (important!)
- Pimpcane
Software
OpenTZT RC4 800x300 Version.
OpenTZT RC2 640x480 Version
Windows XP SP2
Setup
On the desktop I just ran 3 of the 4 outputs, all set to 800x600, with the OpenTZT UI window on the first, and the other two with the clone window zoomed to 1600x600 and placed at x=800 y=0, which made it perfectly cover the other two desktops.
With a lot of patience and, dare I say it, skill, I was able to line up the two projector images (which were backprojected onto a 5x2meter wide piece of fireproofed lycra) to a point where the join was almost imperceptible. If you looked hard, you could see it, but for the average munter (kind of like a punter but whose vision gets steadily worse through the course of an evening) it looked dead on, even with the screen flapping about in the bass breeze). All that worry about edge blending and alignment and its actually a piece of piss. Of course edge blending is desirable, and this will be addressed in future setups.
Now, one of the nice things about back projecting, and having your beamers accessible, you can make all kind of fine adjustments without having to climb up big ladders.
I'm sure you will agree.
The projectors were connected via huge long VGA cables. These were cheap on ebuyer and the huge length created no visible ghosting or signal degradation. Super.
Also connected to the beamers were huge long composite cables.
The composite connectors were connected to the mixer, which was connected to the dvd and laptop.
The laptop was running OpenTZT RC2 640x480.
The beamers were set to lock to the VGA signal.
Pressing the button marked 'VGA' on my remote control flipped both beamers to the widescreen desktop output.
Pressing the 'Composite' button flipped to the mixer, resulting in two of the same image being projected. Instant switching! Nice.
Even nicer was when at 11.30pm precisely, just as the doors opened, the desktop crashed completely, and the beamers automatically switched to composite in about 1/4 second. Talk about redundancy!
But why did the desktop crash? Confident it wasn't a software problem, I opened the side and peered in and saw the the SATA connection on the harddrive had shaken loose in transit and the huge levels of bass had made it fall off!! (problem prevention - silicone sealant squeezed around the connector makes it nice and secure but also easy to remove and clean off the goo).
SATA cable reconnected, XP rebooted, OpenTZT800x300.exe double clicked hey presto 6 hours solid of 8:3 widescreen visuals.
No crashes.
No weird behaviour.
All clips 800x300 @ 25 or 50fps MJPEG
Solid 50fps output all night.
All effects working except about 4/5 of the crappy 3d ones, which did odd things but didn't crash the software.
In fact, nothing could crash the software.
I suspect as all my clips where freshly made they had no errors in them, which tends to be the main cause of crashes in most vj software.
It was solid as a rock?
It happily played 3 layers of video (each sometimes running 2Gb+ sized clips) with full effects @ 800x300 @ 50fps all night with me hammering the keyboard like a crazed baboon for up to two hours at a time ( VJ Cain did two splendid 1 hour sets on the laptop).
I even tried some FreeFrame effects, the Syzygy free ones worked like a charm and looked great. Most other freeframe effects I am afraid I don't like or trust to run stably in any software let alone a brand new compile of TZT. Most of the Pete ones are now improved and native to TZT so theres no need for them anymore.
I will be testing other ones soon! Though that report will be exclusive to twww.opentzt.com
Boo.
What else?
It was an absolute pleasure to break free from 4:3
The compositional possibilities are astounding, especially to someone moving from 320x240, but thats another thread.
For the future, 800x300 seems rather tame,more pixels, more content!
And edge blending is definately the way forward, along with software correction for correctly aligning the projector (like www.smartprojector.de) would be nice ;-D. I reckon feeding the output into a beast like VVVV is the way to go for this.
Many thanks to Esotic and all the people who have worked on making OTZT such a great tool!
lots of love to all
edit : the pimpcane is for hitting peoples hands who come over and can't resist a fiddle.
Well not last saturday but the one before, the 19th of August, I had the pleasure of VJ'ing at The Slackers Convention with a freshly minted copy of OpenTZT, adapted by the venerable VJ Esotic to run at a resolution of 800x300 of your common square computer pixels, spread over two desktops each running at 800x300, thus creating a lovely 8:3 aspect ratio. It was great! Heres how it went down :
Hardware
Desktop PC
- Asus P5WD2-E Premium with Intel Penitum D 820 @ 3Ghz
- 2 x Radeon X1600XT graphics cards
- 1gig ram, 300gb HD, moose, keyboard, 19inch monitor.
- 2 x viewsonic projectors (2000lumen / max res 800x600)
- 1 dvd player
- 1 dell laptop (coreduo thing with radeon x1300)
- 1 old video mixer with dual composite outputs
- A remote control for the beamers (important!)
- Pimpcane
Software
OpenTZT RC4 800x300 Version.
OpenTZT RC2 640x480 Version
Windows XP SP2
Setup
On the desktop I just ran 3 of the 4 outputs, all set to 800x600, with the OpenTZT UI window on the first, and the other two with the clone window zoomed to 1600x600 and placed at x=800 y=0, which made it perfectly cover the other two desktops.
With a lot of patience and, dare I say it, skill, I was able to line up the two projector images (which were backprojected onto a 5x2meter wide piece of fireproofed lycra) to a point where the join was almost imperceptible. If you looked hard, you could see it, but for the average munter (kind of like a punter but whose vision gets steadily worse through the course of an evening) it looked dead on, even with the screen flapping about in the bass breeze). All that worry about edge blending and alignment and its actually a piece of piss. Of course edge blending is desirable, and this will be addressed in future setups.
Now, one of the nice things about back projecting, and having your beamers accessible, you can make all kind of fine adjustments without having to climb up big ladders.
I'm sure you will agree.
The projectors were connected via huge long VGA cables. These were cheap on ebuyer and the huge length created no visible ghosting or signal degradation. Super.
Also connected to the beamers were huge long composite cables.
The composite connectors were connected to the mixer, which was connected to the dvd and laptop.
The laptop was running OpenTZT RC2 640x480.
The beamers were set to lock to the VGA signal.
Pressing the button marked 'VGA' on my remote control flipped both beamers to the widescreen desktop output.
Pressing the 'Composite' button flipped to the mixer, resulting in two of the same image being projected. Instant switching! Nice.
Even nicer was when at 11.30pm precisely, just as the doors opened, the desktop crashed completely, and the beamers automatically switched to composite in about 1/4 second. Talk about redundancy!
But why did the desktop crash? Confident it wasn't a software problem, I opened the side and peered in and saw the the SATA connection on the harddrive had shaken loose in transit and the huge levels of bass had made it fall off!! (problem prevention - silicone sealant squeezed around the connector makes it nice and secure but also easy to remove and clean off the goo).
SATA cable reconnected, XP rebooted, OpenTZT800x300.exe double clicked hey presto 6 hours solid of 8:3 widescreen visuals.
No crashes.
No weird behaviour.
All clips 800x300 @ 25 or 50fps MJPEG
Solid 50fps output all night.
All effects working except about 4/5 of the crappy 3d ones, which did odd things but didn't crash the software.
In fact, nothing could crash the software.
I suspect as all my clips where freshly made they had no errors in them, which tends to be the main cause of crashes in most vj software.
It was solid as a rock?
It happily played 3 layers of video (each sometimes running 2Gb+ sized clips) with full effects @ 800x300 @ 50fps all night with me hammering the keyboard like a crazed baboon for up to two hours at a time ( VJ Cain did two splendid 1 hour sets on the laptop).
I even tried some FreeFrame effects, the Syzygy free ones worked like a charm and looked great. Most other freeframe effects I am afraid I don't like or trust to run stably in any software let alone a brand new compile of TZT. Most of the Pete ones are now improved and native to TZT so theres no need for them anymore.
I will be testing other ones soon! Though that report will be exclusive to twww.opentzt.com
Boo.
What else?
It was an absolute pleasure to break free from 4:3
The compositional possibilities are astounding, especially to someone moving from 320x240, but thats another thread.
For the future, 800x300 seems rather tame,more pixels, more content!
And edge blending is definately the way forward, along with software correction for correctly aligning the projector (like www.smartprojector.de) would be nice ;-D. I reckon feeding the output into a beast like VVVV is the way to go for this.
Many thanks to Esotic and all the people who have worked on making OTZT such a great tool!
lots of love to all
edit : the pimpcane is for hitting peoples hands who come over and can't resist a fiddle.