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Does the pixel density of the stage matter?


todhop

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I am laying out a six monitor production. The monitors are all 1920x1080 but vary in size. I must choose a pixel density for the stage in order to calculate proper monitor size and spacing on the stage.

 

My question is, does the pixel density I choose for the stage matter to the quality of the final product or the performance of the production machine? Should I use the pixel density of the largest display, resulting in a smaller stage, or the pixel density of the smallest display, resulting in a very large stage? 

 

Or is it a compromise?

 

Cheers,

               tod

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Does lowering the screen display "size" below the display resolution affect the resulting image quality in any way?

 

Well yes, if the original image dimensions are smaller than the final / actual display dimensions,

then the original image is scaled to the final size.

While the gpu scaling is pretty darn good, it is not completely transparent,

some softening of the image will be observed.

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I understand that image quality will be lost if an original must be scaled up for display. I'm trying to understand whether the stage size has any effect on when and how scaling occurs when the "size" of the display does not match the "resolution" of the display.. I believe you are indicating that this does not have any effect on scaling.  Scaling is a function of only the source resolution and the display resolution, regardless of the relative "size" of the display as defined in the composition.

 

I presume the pixel density of the stage does have an affect on the performance of the production computer. That would be why Jonas suggest a smaller stage. A smaller stage in the software would decrease the load on the production computer without affecting the quality of the rendering on the display computer.

 

Cheers,

               tod

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ALL settings up OR down of pixel density, will be a scaling and affect the perceived output, this is natural.

As is if you scale content, for example from 720p to 1080p in WATCHOUT.

 

All this is done by the graphics card in the Display computer, which is, as JFK describes above, pretty dam good.

And usually a lot better than the screens built-in scaling, which is then not used, since you feed them all natively.

 

 

"I presume the pixel density of the stage does have an affect on the performance of the production computer"

 

No, not really.

 

 

"That would be why Jonas suggest a smaller stage"

 

No, it's because then you also can make your content smaller in size pixelwise, for all the physically smaller screens vs the biggest one.

That is if you intend all screens to behave like one, ie a circle is a circle of the same size when moving over the stage.

Saves production time in my book. If the scaling is visible or not, will be more dependant on viewing distances, I think.

 

 

/jonas

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Then deselecting "Width and height same as display computer" does affect the final output quality? I had been led to believe it would not.

 

You are saying that setting "Stage Position and Size of Display" to a value lower then the "Display Resolution" setting will reduce the quality of the final presentation because source material will be sized down in the composition and then back up on the display computer.

 

That means that for the highest quality presentation, I would set all screen sizes to a value equal to or higher than their display resolution.

 

Is their any way I can include screenshots? When I composed this with images, I was told that I was not authorized.

 

Cheers,

                tod

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... Is their any way I can include screenshots? When I composed this with images, I was told that I was not authorized.

 

Cheers,

                tod

 

Yes, you can include pictures (screenshots), but you most host the images and link to their URL.

I posted this image in my personal private web space, then clicked on the picture button in the editor here,

and pasted in the image's URL (http://dataton.net/watchout/screen_shots/LeftPanel-stage-display_dialog.png) , as in ....

LeftPanel-stage-display_dialog.png

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All WATCHOUT does is scale up the original pixels when the stage is set to a smaller number of pixels than the display.

It does not scale it down and then back up, unless you use a tween a track to scale it down.

 

You are saying that setting "Stage Position and Size of Display" to a value lower then the "Display Resolution" setting will reduce the quality of the final presentation because source material will be sized down in the composition and then back up on the display computer.

 

That means that for the highest quality presentation, I would set all screen sizes to a value equal to or higher than their display resolution.

 

Yes, you could do that. Just keep in mind, that WATCHOUT must first process all the original pixels of the oversized original

and then scale it to the final resolution. While this can be done, plan to throw more hardware at that solution to better accommodate the extra workload of processing all those pixels that ultimately will be discarded.

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All WATCHOUT does is scale up the original pixels when the stage is set to a smaller number of pixels than the display.

It does not scale it down and then back up, unless you use a tween a track to scale it down.

 

 

Even then it won't scale it twice at runtime. Scaling is all collapsed to a single operation.

 

Mike

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