RBeddig

Hi TomT, I tested Artnet/DMX on a WATCHPAX 4 (6.1.5) and a small display server (6.1.6) using a KISSBOX DMX-512. All works as expected. I could send DMX using a production notebook and playing a video on a display computer at the same time. No stutter on the video. Then I went offline and controlled the display computer through telnet to start the same timeline. Now the display computer sent Artnet and my led lamp and the video did the same as before. As jfk wrote, you will need to send authenticate 1 first and then load "showname" to make the display computer take over control. Rainer Beddig

Thanks for sharing Thomas, Will have a look into that in the coming days. Rainer

There is no limitation in WATCHOUT preventing this. BUT, you need to make sure that the capture cards can be installed correctly and their driver(s) do not conflict. If this works with WDM drivers inside Windows it should also work with WATCHOUT.

Since version 6.1 the displays can have different resolutions but NOT different frame rates. See the release notes: Displays connected to the same display computer can now have different resolutions.

Proper tweaking is the key to success!

Whenever you run into such problems, the best way is to use a Telnet client on the same computer to send out the string. This usually also shows you possible answers from the controlled device. If it then works with a Telnet software you can try to port the result to WATCHOUT. Always add $0D at the end.

Jim is of course right, but if it is one continuous part of the show which needs to be triggered you could still use timecode for this. In this case I would program this part using the main timeline and for the rest I would use auxiliary timelines. External timecode will not control any auxiliary timeline.

With capture cards you have to add one to each server plus d/a boxes to distribute the signal etc. A new way to reduce the hardware costs could be NDI. It would just take one dedicated computer to catch the signals through fast capture cards and then stream the content using the NDI protocol. This does not need any extra hardware on the display server side and would also work with devices like the new WATCHPAX 4.

We are running the 60 day test version of vMix at PL+S in Frankfurt right now. The bottle neck here is the USB capture device which adds latency but could not be avoided due to late notice. We will do more tests with areal computer and capture card after the show.

Another way to control such a system would be to use WATCHNET. Version 1.4 will be able to control the production computer and can run side-by-side with WATCHMAKER. It just takes one more dongle of course. You could even consider to give a portable device (iPad, Android,...) to a speaker on stage or the show caller etc. and have them control certain aspects of the show. We are actually showing a sample of WATCHNET 1.4 in Frankfurt at the PL+S this week.

Michael, Although in many cases our clients would stick for Spyder (not so common over here), E2 or Analogway Ascender, there are many small projects where we also tested to use WATCHOUT to do the whole trick. Hardware scalers maybe tend to be a bit more reliable and their manual interfaces (shot boxes, control desks,..) give you more control but there are also ways to achieve almost the same with WATCHOUT. The second point is latency. In a dedicated system like Spyder etc. the latency is very low whatever the source frequency might be. In WATCHOUT latency is much better than it used to be if you use the more expensive capture cards of Datapath but it is probably still slightly longer than what the hardware units have to offer. This is due to the vast amount of DSP power they put into their systems and which will cost you a lot of money. Capture cards and a capable WATCHOUT system are way cheaper but lack the DSP power of course. A thing to look at might be NDI. This technology of NewTek allows you to stream SDI or other signals over the network and this will be supported by WATCHOUT 6.2. We demonstrated this at the ISE in Amsterdam a few weeks ago. NewTek offers a free software to mix two signals before streaming those into the network. The professional software with more channels is available for around 1000$. You could then set up a dedicated small server with capture cards and stream those signals into the WATCHOUT rig. We are about to test this and measure latencies but this might still take a month or so.

We usually use 16GB, sometimes 32GB of RAM for our server builds.WATCHOUT is 32bit software but if you use graphic cards with 8GB video RAM or even more it is good to use more RAM. X99 mainboards usually have quad RAM architecture and you should use 4 bars in such a computer. With other mainboards it may be different but always use the number of bars which fit to your mainboard architecture. Capture cards also use parts of the RAM and if you use those a little bit more RAM capacity won't harm.

This is exactly the problem. It is not only unusual for you and that is why Dataton or the Premium Partners do not purchase a bunch of MST devices or displays with DP loop through just to test them. If Dataton would do that, the price for WATCHOUT would surely increase to cover the cost for all the devices Dataton would have to buy for testing. In addition to this, devices like MST hubs change very often so if we would test a certain device now it would for sure not be available anymore when the "long term stability test" is over. If you use any sort of splitter behind the graphic card output the setup will not be visible to WATCHOUT. E.g. a MATROX triple head unit would appear as one oversized display to the graphic card and to WATCHOUT. You would therefore need to use virtual displays in WATCHOUT to define the real setup and map those onto real 2D displays. This will add to the load of a system.

We recently tested the WATCHPAX 4 with 4 LED processors on one LED (4x 1080p60) and did not see any tearing or other sync related issues on the border between the four outputs/processors. I would call the outputs of a WATCHPAX 4 genlocked indeed. If you need more than 4 outputs you should definitely go for servers with S400 or Nvidea syncboards if you prefer Nvidea.

Hmmm.... On a WATCHMAX you should use active DP > DVI adaptors. Is this a new system? Have you used it successfully in other places with those adaptors and CAT extensions before? I just took a short glimpse at one of the videos and in my opinion the error points to issues behind the graphic card outputs. You will see display configuration errors as soon as one output looses track to the display (edid).

The i7-5930K is ok for most applications and should be fine for four outputs @ 1200p60. The W8100 is a nice graphic card but probably a W7100 or WX7100 should be ok too. We have built quite a few servers for our clients using the i7-5930K and a W7100 and all servers could play 4x fullHD without any problems as long as the videos are properly encoded. I would suggest to look into the following points one after the other: Can you set up your graphic card under Windows (without WATCHOUT) to send out 3x or 4x 1920x1080@50/60fps? Once this works, check your encoding to find the best settings to play 4x fullHD. Other aspects influencing the playback of videos - not the graphic card capabilities - are the the correct tweaking of your system and the SSD setup. We always use one drive for Windows only and at least a RAID-0 of two reliable SSD drives. Using a dedicated RAID card and more than 2 drives will increase the reading speed of your system and take load off the cpu. Or use a M.2 SSD instead.

That's correct. For 3D projection mapping you need to turn live mode on. But maybe you can disable the output of the computer which you do not need for your mapping while you do your alignment. Then, after aligning, you can turn live mode off again.

zaharbaz, I've not used the K4200 and it seems to be out of production for a while. The current professional cards would be M4000 and larger. We have tested the M4000 and found that with some codecs the card did not play the same number of videos as with a comparable AMD card while other codecs were ok. What I notice is that you are using a mainboard with PCIe Gen. 3 while the card is PCIe Gen. 2 only. This is not a dramatic problem but your PCIe slot could deliver way more data than the card can process. On the other hand, WATCHOUT renders most video content on the CPU (which model are you using here?) and even rather small graphic cards can play 2-3 1080p60 signals if BIOS, drivers and physical ports allow for this. I'm pretty sure that you have problems with your hardware installation and /or the drivers for your card. You should first try to generate your intended output resolutions from inside Windows alone - without WATCHOUT. If this works then chances are high that it also works with WATCHOUT. If it fails it will also fail with WATCHOUT. Another point to look at is EDID management. All displays send their EDID data to the source computer and if they send wrong data the pairing between the graphic card and the monitor will not work as expected. We use external EDID minders whenever we use resolutions which are not the preferred resolution of a display. Newer graphic card drivers (AMD and Nvidea workstation models) allow EDID management inside the driver as well but take care with this if you are not too sure of what you're doing.

Just a hint from my side.... We recently surveyed a customer's installation where a "lost connection" issue happened once a week. The issue was that a the server was not fully tweaked and one application on the server looked for an update once a week. Having said this, the error message can really mean a lot of things. It could be a network issue but more often it relates to lost EDID information (you will then also see some "unexpected display reconfigurations" in the log file), wrong tweaking,.... Rainer

Hi, To my knowledge, the blackdogaudio USB interfaces should actually work without installing drivers. I usually connect USB audio interfaces to my display computers but I know that other people use the production computer instead. Using the display computers in my opinion has a benefit when it comes to backup systems. Just plug one interface into the main display set and one into the backup set and both will work fine. /Rainer

WATCHOUT should not interfere with graphic card driver changes at all. Have done this very often over the last 17 years.

I have tried Dante virtual sound card software on one of our servers and it worked with 8 channels. I also heard from some clients that they are using Dante with WATCHOUT.

To be honest, I would also take a closer look at the WATCHPAX 4. You can use both USB 3 ports for external capture devices and indeed the new NDI feature will make capturing of Powerpoint sources much easier. You will see a couple of external NDI converters in the near future which will translate the usual formats into NDI. The WATCHPAX 4 is really portable and pretty robust.

Which capture cards do you use?

$0D is usually what makes the string go off. Always add it to the end of your string. If "@" is not interpreted in the right way when sent as "@", you might try to use the $40 which is the hex-code representing "@".