Watchout, Vista Spyder X20 and Resolutions.

[dylanvanegmond]

Hi Watchout friends,

 

I'm pretty new with Watchout, trying to wrap my head around what it can and cannot do and how to use it in my setup.

I've been browsing this forum a bit but couldn't find the complete answer to my question. 

 

Ok. I have a setup of 3 projectors(1920 x1080) on a 20 x 4 meter projection-screen. A resolution of 5060 x 1012(1080) using a 350 blend in my setup. Here fore I will use Watchout as a video playback server, background images and do the rest of the switching with a Vista X20. So Watchout server > X20 > Projectors.

 

In my setup the X20 with fix the blending. 

 

I'm in contact now with the production company that will produce the background images. And they will produce a 5060 x 1080 video that they will pre-split into 3 .H264 files. Left, middle, right. Watchout will play that back using a video proxy.

 

Since Watchout will not do any blending in this setup I'm wondering how to setup the outputs, in what resolution. If I'm going for 3x 1920 x 1080 then I will need to position the pre-split video files in a way so they match up. And since the video files are smaller then 1920 I think that's going to be hard. 

 

I might be overlooking something here or not doing the math in the right way.. So what's the best wat to do this?

 

Thanks in advance.

[jfk]

.... Since Watchout will not do any blending in this setup I'm wondering how to setup the outputs, in what resolution. If I'm going for 3x 1920 x 1080 then I will need to position the pre-split video files in a way so they match up.

 

 

And since the video files are smaller then 1920 I think that's going to be hard. 

 

I might be overlooking something here or not doing the math in the right way.. So what's the best wat to do this?

 

Thanks in advance.

 

 

 

Set it up with three 1920x1080 outputs,

make the pre-split and pre-overlapped movies in 1920x1080,

setup your WATCHOUT stage with the exact same co-ordinates used in making the pre-split movies (with an offset if you would like).

 

Then turn off soft-edge blending in WATCHOUT.

 

You might also want to look at these threads.

Spyder VISTA how to

Watchout & Spyder

[Neil Stratton]

Hi Dylan - as Jim says the simplets way is to produce 3 1920 x 1080 videos.

 So say you were using AE or similar, your composition would be 5060x1080.

 When you render you would crop the videos to leave you with 3 1920 x 1080 vts.

 So VT1- crop right by 3140

      VT2 - crop left by 1570, crop right by 1570

      VT3- crop left by 3140

 Then add a video proxy, setting the size to 5060 x 1080 and follow the instructions in the manual.

Hope this helps.

 Cheers

Neil

[sean moss]

Hi All

 

We at our company have just purchased a  x20 spider to run in conjunction with our Watchout  on a lot of our bigger conferences. 

 

And I was wondering if those of you who operate both systems have any tips advice or hacks that I could look at in running these two systems simultaneously. Also I'd like to ask those of you, who run both systems how you have physically configured the systems and what does your workflow looks like.

 

 

Thanks 

 

 

sean

[dylanvanegmond]

That helped a lot JFK and Neil! Thanks for that.

Was indeed looking for the"turn off softblending" option.

 

Things got a bit mixed up in the brain I guess since WO is not doing any blending, still uses the 3x 1920 x1080 output but shows a video that is smaller than that. I thought: how do I line them up?!

 

Quick other question. I've been reading a lot on this forum about the "max resolution" of a single video file in WO.

Spoke to a local video tech here in Stockholm yesterday and he said that a 5060 x 1080 should not be any problem to play as a single file(instead of pre-splitting) if you use just one server and use Quicktime Animation instead of H264. Any pro's and cons to this?

 

Thanks a lot! 

[jfk]

QuickTime animation codec 5060 x 1080 movie file in a .mov container is likely to be problematic.

Frame rate is relevant as well, progressive highly preferred.

That codec is RGB, supports transparency, and can be encoded lossless.

Quicktime animation codec can be a massive demand on the throughput of the system

The actual image content plays a large role here.

Due to the simple RLE lossless compression used in Animation codec,

 animations that fit the codec's original purpose ("cartoon" cel animations) with large single color areas,

perform quite well. Camera acquired video and synthetic animation (rendered from After Effects, FinalCut, etc.)

are typically huge resource hogs.

 

QuickTime h.264 codec is a YUV lossy codec with no transparency support.

It is far more efficient and is most likely to provide success with 5060 x 1080 single movie files.

 

5060 x 1080 can also be a challenge to encode,

depending on the encoding tools chosen.

 i.e. not all encoding tools support resolutions as high as 5060 x 1080.

 

A tip to consider is using both - each for its strength.

Instead of rendering your compositions as a single movie file,

separate appropriate layers to two different file formats.

This can provide the best of both,

with h.264 (mpeg4) handing all the camera acquired and low res content,

and animation codec with transparency for all the synthetic animations (animated text, icons, etc.)

Play the two in synch and the results can be better than any single file could provide (up to the current v5 version).

In many cases you may want to break up the synthetic layers into multiple animation codec movie files.

Rather than make one 5060 x 1080 animation movie file with huge areas of transparency,

keep them small and position / move them with WATCHOUT tweens.

Even though huge areas of transparent areas should compress well,

 the decoder still has to deal with every tansparent pixel like any visible pixel.

Crop your animated areas tightly and keep the file(s) more efficient.

Systems setup to perform with the dual movie approach often benefit

from SSD RAIDs with higher-speed PCIe 3.0 controllers.

Jim

 

 

That helped a lot JFK and Neil! Thanks for that.

Was indeed looking for the"turn off softblending" option.

 

Things got a bit mixed up in the brain I guess since WO is not doing any blending, still uses the 3x 1920 x1080 output but shows a video that is smaller than that. I thought: how do I line them up?!

 

Quick other question. I've been reading a lot on this forum about the "max resolution" of a single video file in WO.

Spoke to a local video tech here in Stockholm yesterday and he said that a 5060 x 1080 should not be any problem to play as a single file(instead of pre-splitting) if you use just one server and use Quicktime Animation instead of H264. Any pro's and cons to this?

 

Thanks a lot! 

[jfk]

Things got a bit mixed up in the brain I guess since WO is not doing any blending, still uses the 3x 1920 x1080 output but shows a video that is smaller than that. I thought: how do I line them up?!

 ... 5060 x 1080 

 

By defining your final total output as 5060 x 1080, you have also specified how to line them up.

It is tedious math from there. To achieve ...

• 5060 x 1080 total image size
• assembled from  three 1920 x 1080 displays (projectors)
• set Width and height same as Display resolution
• adding a Leftmost display offset in the stage 100,100.

you would set the following stage co-ordinates:

• Stage Position 1   100 L    100 T
• Stage Position 2  1670 L   100 T
• Stage Position 3  3240 L   100 T

Above results in horizontal overlap of ≈ 350 pixels in each overlapped area.

 

Then go to File-Preferences - Edge Blend tab and turn off blending.

Do this by selecting the existing blend curve tween point and dragging off to delete it,

then grab the endpoint in the top left corner and drag it to the bottom left corner,

resulting in a flat line on the "x-axis".

Blending off 

 

BTW If you did not catch it in the reference threads,

the X 20 Spyder is going to give you fits with EDID.

Highly recommended you get three matched solid EDID managers with their own power supplies,

set the EDID managers up and test them, before arriving  to connect to the X 20,

and save yourself a lot of time.

[Walter]

Dylan,

Another way of turning off edgeblend is putting the center screen on another tier. Helpful if you have another widescreen in your show where you DO need the blend (i.e. a blended floor projection without live inputs thus driven directly from watchout)

[dylanvanegmond]

Super! Thanks a lot all! I will test out these settings somewhere this week.

[shaggy]

Hi, I'm delighted to pick up this thread. I'm new into Spyder and Watchout and as the Spyder Operator I have a job with a similar setup to the one above. I was interested to discover the best workflow for the edge-butting/overlap issues. We will have 3 x 1080p projection blend with total image height of 869px and blend overlay of 384px. Traditionally outputs are set to native resolutions of the displays; however with the source display size of 869px high this would lead to a letter-boxing effect (which is acceptable if nothing is displayed in the top and bottom areas). As there are so many potential areas of manipulation (projection resolution; input resolution; Spyder output resolution; Spyder output blending; EDID control; Watchout blending/overlay/edge-butting and Spyder source blending/edge-butting and all the inherent timing issues) it's quite an equation! My initial thought was to start from the projection end of the equation and work backwards through the workflow to find the best solution.

 

For this job I understand Watchout is the only source and Spyder is being used to control the blending.

 

Question 1: Is it best to set the Spyder Output resolutions to be native to the projectors or to the image display size e.g. (3 x (1920x1080 c/w overlay allowance) or 3 x (1920 x 869 c/w overlay allowance)?

 

Question 2: Whether to edge-butt the sources in Spyder (knowing that there's no guaranteed alignment this way), slightly oversize them in the Spyder GUI then soft-edge those sources to compensate for any timing issues. Alternatively should the overlaying be done upstream from Spyder by Watchout?

 

My thanks in advance for any advice and guidance.

 

Shaggy

[rdkamperRDK]

Hi, I'm delighted to pick up this thread. I'm new into Spyder and Watchout and as the Spyder Operator I have a job with a similar setup to the one above. I was interested to discover the best workflow for the edge-butting/overlap issues. We will have 3 x 1080p projection blend with total image height of 869px and blend overlay of 384px. Traditionally outputs are set to native resolutions of the displays; however with the source display size of 869px high this would lead to a letter-boxing effect (which is acceptable if nothing is displayed in the top and bottom areas). As there are so many potential areas of manipulation (projection resolution; input resolution; Spyder output resolution; Spyder output blending; EDID control; Watchout blending/overlay/edge-butting and Spyder source blending/edge-butting and all the inherent timing issues) it's quite an equation! My initial thought was to start from the projection end of the equation and work backwards through the workflow to find the best solution.

 

For this job I understand Watchout is the only source and Spyder is being used to control the blending.

 

Question 1: Is it best to set the Spyder Output resolutions to be native to the projectors or to the image display size e.g. (3 x (1920x1080 c/w overlay allowance) or 3 x (1920 x 869 c/w overlay allowance)?

 

Question 2: Whether to edge-butt the sources in Spyder (knowing that there's no guaranteed alignment this way), slightly oversize them in the Spyder GUI then soft-edge those sources to compensate for any timing issues. Alternatively should the overlaying be done upstream from Spyder by Watchout?

 

My thanks in advance for any advice and guidance.

 

Shaggy

On question one:

The spider will only put out standard resolutions so you have to use a 1080.

 

On Question two:

If you can do the blending with the projectors that would be best.

.

In the Spyder set up a Widescreen 3 display with 384 pixels overlap.

Then look for System patch/Output display/look for Blending options (new window). Turn off bend "enabled".

 

In Watchout set  the display configuration  to 1920 x 1080. Overlap the Displays 384 pixels and also turn off the bending in Watchout.

The custom content 1920x 869 will play within the space.

 

 

By the way you can Butt edge pixel to pixel in the spyder.

By clicking on View stacked/ Program/Pixel space (new window). You can set the coordinates of each display.

 

Richard

 

Watchout and Spyder Operator