From: Klaus W. Eisenlohr (email suppressed)
Date: Sat Sep 29 2007 - 05:18:13 PDT
Dear Mike,
Masking is not really an option, I feel, I do not
want to build a case around monitors (it is
easier with projections, I agree.
However I wanted to share what I found out so far:
1) The mentioned video card VTBook for powerbooks
does not allow to play 3 independend monitors, it
does only give one additional monitor to the
powerbook, and the opportunity to mirror another
one with an adapter (the advertising on
http://www.villagetronic.com/vtbook/index.html,
thus is kind of a hoax)
2) On the other hand, it seems it is easy to add
a AT Radeon PCI-Card to the G4 Desktop (I am
owning a G4 mirrored doors) and thus add
additional two monitors, if the requirements on
resolution are not too high. Prices seem to be
reasonable too: under 200 ¤.
3) With the VLC player it is possible to have two
or more copies of the application running and YES
have them in presentation mode on different
monitors. The downside is that the VLC player is
very slow and buggy, it crashes frequently, it
has problems playing back sound if the bitrate of
the stream is too high (does not play DV
comporession), AND I found out that it does not
stay in sync when looping two movies on two
monitors, I had a difference of a second after
playing a short clip for around 30 minutes.
4) (I could not get mplayer to run on my OS)
My conclusion so far: I guess I will try out the
extra Video card in my desktop G4 for futur
shows, but I guess for now, I will try to get 3
identical consumer DVD players, which I can
operate from one remote control, and then live
with the glitch for the upcoming show with 3
screens.
Thank you to everybody
Klaus
>You should be able to put the two video streams
>together side by side into one quicktime movie
>and then just let quicktime play it back. You
>may not be able to go fullscreen without it
>constricting itself to one screen, but if you
>pull the window out to cover both screens, you
>should be able to cover most of both of the
>screens with video. What is not video should be
>pretty easy to mask out with something like
>black wrap or even some cardboard (though be
>careful if it's a really hot projector). I'm
>also guessing that some software made
>specifically for live video mixing might be able
>to do the two-screens-two-videos thing, but
>short of that or Max/MSP or something that is on
>the verge of getting really technical, nothing
>comes to mind.
>
>Hope this helps!
>Mike
>
-- Klaus W. Eisenlohr, Osnabrücker Str. 25, D-10589 Berlin, Germany email: email suppressed and film production: http://www.richfilm.de phone: int.- 49 - 30 - 3409 5343 (BERLIN) __________________________________________________________________ For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.