Multidisplays

Hi there,

A couple of months ago I completed my final year project for Staffordshire University with the help and advice of members of this forum, especially Thomas Leong.
It's a 3 screen entertainment piece, designed to give the feel of a live rock concert with pre-recorded media. The whole project was completed by myself, shooting, editing, effects, sync projection and lighting. Obvisouly it was not completely me, you always need help with any project and I'dike to say thanks to Patrick Hearn, Dan Mee, Chris Munn, Paul Bentley and Janneman Beute.

I recieved my final marks recently and was given full marks, 15 out of 15 for my project and 22 out of 30 for my dissertation so I am very please with how it all turned out.

The video below is a live recording of the project being displayed mixed with some of the raw footage from the screens. Please let me know what you think and leave any comments.

http://ultim8caraudio.co.uk/flash/paulh.html The video is hosted on a friends server hence the odd name.

Thanks again to all those who helped with advice and know how!

Paul

Hi Paul,

Congratulations on your project's completion and the scores obtained!

Tried the site you gave but can't really view the video because my download speed was very staccato....like 1 frame per 3-5 secs. If you can provide a download link where one can view the video offline, that would be less painful.

Questions:
1. How did you find Wings Platinum as a first time user?
2. Did you use the dual graphics output to minimise licences or did you go Master + 3 Slaves?
3. Did you capture DMX to the timeline and control lights from there or ran lights from a separate controller? If you did capture DMX to timeline, which DMX IN unit did you use? I have a USB-DMX unit from ENTTEC which Wings won't talk to.

Thomas

Hi Thomas,

I've just uploaded two compressed versions of the video for people to download
http://www.mediafire.com/?jzu4d9a9xxe this one is the edited version including the screens footage
http://www.mediafire.com/?1de1kmdmz12 this is a static shot of the whole display

The files are mp4 so something like VLC would be best to play them on.

To answer your questions:
1: It has to be said that Wings impressed me more than I thought it would, the sheer amount of things it can do and control is simply amazing. As I only had one day with it before my show I had to learn the basics of what I needed and little else so unfortunatly I cannot give it a proper review. I did struggle initially to get to grips with it, the interface seemed tricky for a while. I needed some help with the networking side of things, it's not my strongest asset. The manual was surprisingly useful and clear and helped me through a lot of it however at times it was only through playing with it myself I could get it to work.
It is however, the most exciting piece of software I've ever used, I continued to read the manual even after I had to send the software back just because of all the things it can do, I am desperatly hoping I get another chance to test it more at some stage. It feels very stable and accomplished, I jsut wish I could have used it more.

2: I did use dual head mode so I only had to use 3 licenses. 1 Master, 1 single slave and a dual head slave. I was surprised at how much power the program needed to display one full screen output, one of the PC's wasn't good enough and had to be used as the master instead. My dual head machine was a quad core 2.66ghz, Nvidia 8800GTS with 4GB of Ram and my single head slave was a dual core 2.66Ghz, Nvidia 9750GT, 4GB RAM both of which ran different versions of Vista.

3: The lighting control is the one dissapointment of the project, to keep things simple I had planned and arranged to output SMPTE from wings from the sound card into the lighting console to trigger each lighting scene which were pre-timed. Unfortunately, the lighting technician I had hired to help me and provide equipment got robbed the day before he was supposed to start work with me so replacement equipment had to be found and the console we got didn't have a SMPTE port. Each scene was et up on the console in time with the music but had to be triggered manually with the show. It was dissapointing for me, but more importantly, it was un-noticabke to the audience and the show went as planned.
From memory, there are only two types of DMX-USB adapter that are compatible with wings, the AV StumpFL brand and the other i think was called ligthbox or something similar, I can't quite find it on the internet. I remember specifically reading that there were only two.

I have to say thank you again Thomas for all your help and advice during the project, I entered into it completely unaware of any show control systems or similar and your help especially was essential throughout. I also put you in the acknowledgments of my dissertation!

Hope you enjoy the video!

Paul