Many outputs?

CitizenJoe

Does anyone have any experience with either of these cards, or something similar?

Matrox M9188 M9188-E2048F 2GB PCI Express x16 Graphics Card - Newegg.ca

NVIDIA NVS 810 for Eight DP Displays (pny.com)

I need to do a large number of outputs, either 8 or 16 and need Isadora to treat each of the available outputs as a single display. 16 outputs is achieved by using 2 of the cards in tandem, which they are designed to do.

Other ideas welcome!

Thanks for your thoughts!

Cheers,

Hugh

Juriaan

@citizenjoe

Hi there CitizenJoe,

I did an production in the fall (8x dedicated outputs) with an Blackmagic Decklink Quad 2.

Worked well with Isadora 3.x, only irritation that I had is that sometimes during power cycle I had to restart Izzy to make sure that the card was recognized (Like 1 of 25 times)

Let me know if you have any follow up questions

- Juriaan

CitizenJoe

Thanks, @juriaan!

Interesting product. Did you find that you were able use the outputs from the GPU, in addition?

Cheers,

Hugh

Woland

@citizenjoe said:

using 2 of the cards in tandem, which they are designed to do

Isadora is not designed for use with multiple graphics cards (and in most cases it's actually less efficient to use multiple graphics cards anyway). That's not to say Isadora can't work with multiple graphics cards, it's just that we have not designed Isadora for, nor tested Isadora on, machines with multiple graphics cards and as such can't provide technical support if you run into problems with your setup. In certain cases, some users have had success with very carefully-planned and configured setups using Isadora on machines with multiple graphics cards, but by and large you'll have better luck using a single, powerful graphics card and then going out to multiple devices like the Matrox QuadHead or Datapath Fx4 in order to get more discrete outputs. It's also worth noting that the Datapath Fx4 can be daisy-chained, though I'd want to get confirmation from someone on the forum here saying that it isn't a huge pain to do before suggesting that as a primary plan of action.

One other hardware setup I've seen is using Virtual Stages outputting Syphon on macOS, then sending those Stages out to physical display hardware (projectors/beamers/monitors) through the use of Blackmagic devices and BlackSyphon. (I know, for example that Benjamin Krieg used this setup for a production of She She Pop's Hexploitation in the past few years with a 2013 Mac Pro trashcan.)

CitizenJoe

Hi @woland,

Thanks for your notes. I know that Izzy isn't designed for multiple GPU's, which is why I like @Juriaan's idea of the BM Decklink! I have a Matrox QuadHead to go, which is great and also designed to be daisy chained. Not as clean as 8 outputs from a card, though... It's also fussy and the cables don't lock in to place.

Would love to hear of any other experiences.

Cheers,

Hugh

Juriaan

@citizenjoe

Well, that is the great thing about the Blackmagic card, you need additional cables to go to SDI but those are locked tightly and have an quick release mechanic.

Regarding or I was able to use them in addition,

Yeah I got an total of 10, please be aware that you need quite an beefy system to output 10 Full HD streams.. So our Show PC had an 2070 Super, 32 GB of RAM, Intel i7 high-end CPU, etc.. And of course we did proper prep and made sure to do an proper codec on all our material..

CitizenJoe

@juriaan

We have a couple of beefy systems, so I think that will be fine. Thanks for the info!

Cheers,

Hugh