On Edge Blending, 3D warp distortion, Quartz Composer and Syphon
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Hello!
I wanted to share some of my current work and had some questions as to how to optimize it.
I have a 60'x18' screen that curves at the ends. The computer is a Mac Pro with a 5870, a 5770 and an Active Silicon LFG4 capture card for live feeds. I am trying to get the full coverage by using three projectors across the whole screen, edge blended and warped to the curves.
I have achieved some decent results and I have tried several setups involving isadora and syphoning to other programs. Its my first few attempts at actually using syphon, its wicked.
Into blendy and madmapper is not a bad option, I just had trouble getting multiple screens going out of the video card.
Into little projection mapping tool is not bad, but LPMT is a bit too glitchy still and so I think thats a no go.My favorite option so far is to send my video (1920x531px) through syphon into quartz composer. In quartz I have used Visuation Mapio (http://visution.com/mapio) relatively well/easy (you can try it with the demo, it just shows a picture once in a while; I used an FFGL into Quartz composer to run mapio inside quartz - pretty cool!!- how to video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=P1nfle4KdbQ ) and syphon back into Isadora to the separate stages after the warp is done. Attached are some of the pictures of what it looks like, have a look and tell me what you think!
It works but it has limitations and that is what my questions are about. Because of all the jumping I am getting some frame rate irregularities and I have some ideas on how to minimize, just at a bit of a roadblock with them.
The FFGL into quartz with the mapio works fine but I was hoping it would let me save the FFGL actor in quartz with the published in/outputs to be able to drag it into izzy like a qc actor and not have to syphon in/out and run the program with quartz open... My problem is that it wont save the plug in with the in/outs, the freeframe plugin loses the mapio plug in when I save it with the in/outs published. I think it is close to just running in izzy without having to syphon - I just barely understand quartz. Any ideas? How far are we from being able to install mapio plug in as a freeframe 1.5 actor??
Another option was to just run the outputs with quartz composer visualizer, but I have not gotten it to read my qc comp and output... it would be nice if it spanned the three screens and not my control monitor. Any ideas on how this thing works??
I think it would make life simpler if there was someway to get my three projectors reading as one big stage rather than 3 little stages. Is there a way to do this without a triple head 2 go ? There's gotta be a way to do it with the 5770 or the 5870 in OSX.
Anyone have good advice on how to deal with the inability to easily jump out of scenes without losing the quartz patch for this kind of stuff? I can think of running multiple scenes and keeping that one always active and switching vids there or using a broadcast actor, but Its time consuming and not as smooth as I wish I could have it be.
Cheers!
Paco
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The keep one scene active and broadcast to it technique has worked very well for me in the past. Use two broadcast channels and the new current scene number actor to send even scenes on one channel and odd scenes on another and them use the scene intensity actor to fade between them seamlessly.
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Thanks Matthew! I will be trying it out today for sure.
I gave in and plugged in my triple head 2 go, still in disbelief there is no way to do that with the Mac Pro video card, but at least the mapping/edge blending is easier and less intensive if I just full screen the quartz composer viewer across the extended desktop. -
Buy a copy of Resolume. Syphon out of isadora into Resolume. Mapio does your blend/mapping and the built in advanced output chops up part of the video and sends it to different screens. Not the cheapest, but i've tested it recently and it never crashs and has zero latency.
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Nah, I ultimately got it running fairly smoothly, (a decent 50-60 fps) very stoked on the results. Show opens this Friday! It's pretty darn sweet. I will do an update once sleep is had.
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thanks for all this info, Wlad. Checking it out. Hi to Matthew Haber.. been following your work for a while now. :)
