I have been researching countless forums and picking the minds of VJ's, Videographers, and other "presentation specialists" and I have come to the conclusion that the more you learn about this field, the wider and deeper it becomes and you end up feeling like you know less than when you first started researching.
I started out by wanting to have some interesting visuals playing on a screen while I Dj'ed parties. After looking around I found resolume, and life was good. The actual DJ'ing soon took a back seat the VJ'ing and I would try to have the music mapped out before hand so I could just hit play, let the music play, and I could focus on the real time mixing of video, swf and live feeds.
Now I am getting noticed by professional companies that would like to use my skills in a conference/corporate meeting venue. I have just been doing what I consider basic video/audio at meetings and it seems to bowl the participants over, they think it is the most high-tech thing they have ever seen.
It is starting to come back and bite me though, I show up maybe 30 minutes before the meeting to setup, I suddenly have a line of people, someone will have a DVD of the CEO giving a speech, then someone else has an audio CD of something, and someone else has a web address of a report or virtual tour they want played during the meeting.
I frantically convert a portion of the audio to MP3, copy the VOB files to an external drive to play in winamp (with the vob mplayer plugin) bring up the website and then minimize it and during the meeting I just move the webpage, or the winamp window onto my 2nd screen (which happens to be the LCD projector) - The rest of the time I try to keep a flash file of the company logo playing on the screen.
Now after letting you know all the needs/uses I have, is there a program out there that can help me?
One program to be the "connector" so to speak, one program to output a signal to the LCD projector.
On the input side, it can take in a stream from Resolume, or a dvd with audio, or open a webpage and then fade to the webpage and be able to pan and zoom around the web page, then fade back to the resolume feed with the logo animation playing. All seamless to the crowd, (i.e. no windows getting drug across the screen)
I see hardware that will do it (spendy AND you have to setup for 3 hours prior) and I see lots of software that will do parts of it (Some only for Macs)
Is there a windows solution out there? maybe 2 laptops maximum. 1 laptop to run resolume and stream, and the second computer to crunch dvd's, mps, mov files or whatever they throw at me?
I know this was a long read, and what I am looking for is probably not available yet, but I just wanted to ask and see what people thought.
Thanks for your time on reading this and keep those beamers lit!
BTW, if I had an extra $12,000 lying around I would just buy this...
http://www.edirol.com/products/info/v440hd.html
[Edited on 20-10-2005 by ivelop]