Hi Simon,

Where Can we see the video patches you talk about? I´m very interested.

Thanks,

Enrique

On 25 Feb 2008, at 10:32 PM, altern wrote:

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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