How To: Multi-Screen Video Display
Every now and then, I have people ask me how we display a video across multiple screens at Brook Hills. For the last series, “Love Story” we used three 7’x12’ screens all hanging in the same plane with a 1’ space between each screen.
Here’s a picture:
www.brookhills.org
We’ve done several different screen configurations, but the hardware and software we use is the same. Here’s what we use to do it:
Software-
Renewed Vision’s Pro Video Player. We have 1 HD license and 3 Network Node licenses.
Hardware-
3 – Apple Mac Mini
1 – Apple Imac
3 – Da-lite 7’x12’ fast fold screens
3 – Panasonic PT-DW5100U – we picked these up used at a great price from Elite Multimedia.
Here’s how the system works-
The Imac is the brain of the system, and it runs the HD license. It can be located anywhere on the network. Most of the time, ours lives in video master control. Sometimes we move it to front of house. The HD license allows the Imac to drive a projector, but we are not setup to do that right now.
Each Panasonic projector shoots onto a Da-lite 7′x12′ screen, and is driven by a Mac Mini that is strapped to the projector. All projectors are shooting a resolution of 1280×720. Each Mac Mini is hard wired to the network via cat5. If we are using the system to display a single still image that will not change, I can get away with using a wireless network. However, if we are going to run multiple images or video clips, I use a wired network. This assures that the images and videos stay synced correctly.
All of our content is built at a resolution of 3840×720 (3 screens wide x 1 screen high) and then broken out into three 1280×720 images or clips. Each clip is then loaded onto the appropriate Mac Mini and the Imac. Once the content is on the computers, I then add it to the Pro Video Player library on each computer and build the playlists.
Pro Video Player is very user-friendly. You can have multiple play lists, each with different images and video clips. When you click on a playlist on the Master computer, each Network Node moves to that playlist. Click on a video clip in a playlist on the Master, and each Network Node will start playing that clip. It’s that simple.
There are several different configurations of hardware that are available that can be scaled to meet your specific needs. There are also several advanced features in Pro Video Player that we haven’t used yet. I recommend browsing Renewed Vision’s website for more options and ideas.
-Matt-