Datapath X4 vs Arena

[Thelooca]

Hi, i'm considering to buy a datapath X4 after another frustrating live experience with a matrox triplehead...

So i'm wondering if there are people here who use it. I presume the datapath will show up as one big screen in Arena? Or could it be possible to see it as 4 different screens? If not i'm afraid the advanced output screen will be very small to adjust in case of complex/detailed mappings?
About the softedge: will it be in both directions? for example if you connect the the four projectors as a square (upleft/upright/downleft/downright), will the upperleft have softedge on both the down side and the right side?

Any general user experiences are welcome!

thx

[Trypta]

I'm new to Arena (Touch Designer user) so I don't really know how the edge mapping works in Arena but I do own an X4 as well as a couple of Matrox Dual heads. The X4 has dual head beat by a long way. It is much more diverse and is easier to deal with. You can actually run different framesrates and resolutions off of each port as well as choose the area of the input image that is displayed on each port.

My typical setup is:

input - 1920*1080 (single screen made of my two preview, and my 720p output)
output1- 1280 by 720 60hz
output2- 1280 by 720 60hz
output3- 1280 by 720 60hz
output4- 1920 by 1080 30hz captured by another machine

You should be able to get a at least a 3840 by 1080 signal into the X4 with a duallink cable.

If your sending one large image across multiple projectors and Arena is able to edge blend arbitrary sections of the output image then the X4 will work.

cheers
Keith