10-bit playback

[silentdrew]

Hello all,

 

I represent a fine artist who is planning a 300 degree round projection. We plan on using 6 or 7 projectors, edgeblended and feeding a long 'video' (say 8,000 x 1080 pixels). I am researching playback options and WatchOut seems like a great solution. I have a few questions/comment about application that I thought users might be able to comment on;

 

1) our primary focus is on the visual integrity of the image - a lot of time and effort is put into the quality of the color, contrast, composition etc. The worst thing would be if we had great content, great calibration projectors, and then our playback system mangled the image during playback. To what extent does WatchOut add artifacts? Particularlly when using the geometry correction?

2) Our projectors will actually feature geometry correction as well, or we can choose to do this in WatchOut - considering our installation may move from venue to venue in the future I am figuring it is more dynamic to use WatchOut for the correction but concerned it would add noise.

3) Can WatchOut playback a 10-bit file? We could build our computers to output 10-bit (AJA cards I guess) but the platform would need to be able to play this back, in sync without dropping any frames.

 

I guess fundimentally I want to know if WatchOut can be used in an application where the quality of the image is paramount - while we need to 'stitching' and 'geometry' features to make this work and to be able to be dynamic, that is less important if the image is going to be messed up.

 

Sorry for a long and winding first post.