Projector galore!

[Oaktown]

I know people are always looking for ways to output to lots of projectors so here is a few photos of a show I'm working on in NYC this week and the gear breakdown.

Here is the gear I'm using for the video portion of this installation,

• 1 @ MACBOOK PRO (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013) with 2.6 GHz Intel Core i7, 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 and NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 2048 MB
  2 @ APPLE MiniDP to DL DVI adapters with external power
  2 @ DVI-D DUAL LINK cables 6ft set to the X4 EDID
  2 @ GEFFEN DVI DETECTIVE PLUS
  2 @ GEFEN DL DVI 2FO S/R KIT FIBER OPTIC CONVERTER
  2 @ OM2 LC/LC DUPLEX FIBER OPTIC - 30M/100'
  2 @ DATAPATH X4 Display Controllers
  1 @ GEFEN USB 2 EXTENDER with 1 @ ETHERNET CAT6a Cable 100ft (to control the UI on the X4 hardware) using VMWare Fusion on the MBP)
  2 @ DVI-D DUAL LINK Cable 50ft
  5 @ DVI-D DUAL LINK Cable 10ft
  FLOOR PROJECTIONS: 3 @ 20K Panasonic DZ21K HD projectors with ET-D75LE6 lenses pointed straight down and blended into one large image using a 3840x2160 @ 30Hz signal broken down in three 1080i60 images
  PANEL PROJECTIONS: 2 @ 20K Panasonic DZ21K HD projectors with ET-D75LE6 lenses and 2 @ 12K Sanyo XF46 XGA projectors with LNS-W05 lenses using a 2306x1536 @ 60Hz signal broken down in two 1024x768 @ 60Hz images (Sanyo projectors) and two 1280x720 @ 60Hz images (Panasonic projectors).
  RESOLUME ARENA 5 with 5376x1024 composition taking one Syphon feed and running at a steady 30FPS (which matches the Datapath X4 unit set to 3840x2160 @ 30Hz)
  Advanced output is sent to the two X4 units and broken down in seven screens with 12 masks.

I wished all seven projectors would have been 20K HD Panasonic projectors but we only had 5 which is why we ended up using the two 12K Sanyos. As a note, the three 20K projectors for the floor projections were too bright and I had to reduce the opacity to 70% to get it right!

To recap, this whole installation is run from a Macbook Pro and we've been running it without any glitches.

We've got three more shows (today 4p and 7p and tomorrow 7p) so if you're in New York come check it out and say hi.

[Programfeed]

Very cool! Thanks for the breakdown and info. I have the exact same MBP so it's good to see it can handle that load.

With the Apple active DL DVI adapters, are you using both USB ports on the MBP to provide power?

[Oaktown]

No, i use external USB power for stability.

[Empyfree]

Nice project and thanks for the insight to how you are running it. Are you running any sort of backup? Your event looks very "arty" (and very very cool), what would the fall out from a big crash/equipment failiure be? I'm always interested as most of my work is corporate, and a single screen failing would be viewed as something not far from apocalyptic.

I must spend some time with our DVI detectives and our Datapath, I bought them both in a hurry for a big event and mashed something together that worked, but I was holding my breath and had my excuses lined up in case anything went wrong!

[Oaktown]

Your event looks very "arty" (and very very cool), what would the fall out from a big crash/equipment failiure be? I'm always interested as most of my work is corporate, and a single screen failing would be viewed as something not far from apocalyptic.

Failure would have been disastrous since we were presenting the show in NY for APAP which is the Association of Performing Arts Presenters.

Statistically failure is unavoidable but for sure one can take steps to either try to prevent it or have alternatives in case of failure.

In this case, we didn't have the funds to have a complete backup system so our backup system in case of video failure was to switch to lighting only.

I test every system I put out there extensively in my studio and even I have no guarantee that any of the system I design are fail proof, I feel that if I can run the compositions for hours on end with no failure, I'm in a good place.

I'm sure there are many other ways to approach redundancy but now if I wanted to have a full backup system for this one, I would actually redesign the system and use 2 identical MBP laptops with 2 4K Blackmagic capture cards for outputs set both capture card outputs to 3840x2160 and run the whole system through a 4K switcher such as BMD ATEM 1M/E Production Studio 4K. I would use the same show control system (Qlab on a Macbook Air i7) using OSC to trigger everything in sync. I would also set the capture card to show the last frame if they lose signal so that I never have black on stage when I need to switch my signal at the switcher.

If the stakes were huge, I would actually run two complete systems in parallel (media server, signal distribution and projectors) but it gets very expensive and time consuming so that's rarely an option. Most of my corporate clients want redundancy but choke when they understand the cost of having complete redundancy (equipment, extra time at the venue, labor, etc...) so they typically agree to go without it!

[Empyfree]

My favourite is "why should we pay for a backup? If it fails to start with we're not paying you..." I like the idea of running in tandem through a switcher.

We often run through a vision mixer or presentation switcher, and one thing I like to do is frame-store a "holding state" that I can jump to if my media server dies. Never had to use it yet...