On 25 Feb 2008, at 10:32 PM, altern wrote:
I need to have several video outputs that run in sync. A friend who works in a art exhibition space told me there would be couple of solutions for this but both involve buying pretty expensive
equipment like special DVD players.I thought then that a solution for this issue could be to have
several computers on a local network playing video (with GEM) and
synchronise them via OSC. But I dont have any experience doing such a thing,
never used OSC for anything similar. Also I dont have a clue about how to synchronise together videos.Has anyone done anything similar? any experiences to share?
yes. we used a dual-head machine (actually it was a quad-head, so we had plenty of space for editing...) running a single gemwin covering both screens and 2 [pix_film]s that were controlled by the same counter.
since Gem allows you frame-accurate access, the 2 videos were in
perfect synch.but we might need up to 6 to 8 video outputs, thats too much for the same machine. Thats why I thought about having a machine per video output connected to a LAN and synchronised via OSC.
I've done it often, the basic principle for keeping the LAN machines
in constant frame sync, allowing scrubbing etc, is each projector has
a slave patch that uses [pix_film] to play by frame number rather
auto, and receives those frame numbers (via [netreceive]) from a
master patch which has a metro counting the frames and which plays
any sound required. Works very cleanly and doesn't put much data
through the network. Two [pix_film] Gem-chains in each slave will
give you X-fades etc.
I could post the set of patches which add quite a bit more
functionality than that if you like, I've built up a collection over
several projects.
simon