Hey all,
I recently had what I’d describe as a ‘technological crisis’ at an event. We pulled through by only by the skin of our teeth. The problem we had is complex, with many levels that I don’t fully understand. I’m seeing this as an opportunity to broaden my knowledge and wanted to reach out here for voices of experience.
The event was a corporate gala, the plan was to output to 6 projectors rigged on Truss from Resolume / media server and two matrox triple heads connected Via DisplayPort for a very wide panoramic backdrop.
The pipeline summarized:
- Media server outputting 3840x720(3x 720p) to two triple heads via DisplayPort.
- Tripleheads have 6 DP - HDMI adapters connecting them (via HDMI) to an assortment of HDMI to SDI converters. One had 3 Theatrix Xvisions, the other 3 kramers.
- From there the signal is sent via a long SDI cable run to 6 projectors flown on truss. Each triple head outputs to 2x 1080p Barcos, and 1 XGA Christie respectively.
First issue is that the Xvision SDI converters would not take the triplehead’s signal whatsoever. They did not even recognize the HDMI cable being plugged in. I have looked through their documentation and they seem capable of receiving virtually any resolution and refresh rate, which is confusing to me. If this is an issue of refresh rate or an issue with the Triplehead, I want to know what hardware I should purchase to alleviate this (Datapath X4?) or at least the underlying issue so that I can avoid it in the future.
Second issue is that while the Kramers did deliver the signal to the projects, the projectors were not scaling the image properly. By this I mean that the projectors were showing half-raster; particularly noticeable on the 1080 Barcos. I can imagine that this is because I am outputting 720p to 1080p projectors via triplehead, but I seem to recall projectors in comparable setups scaling properly regardless of the triplehead.
We ended up bringing another server with 5 on board outputs so that we could avoid tripleheads altogether. We then ran into the strange problem of the Barco projectors not receiving signal from the Theatrix Xvisions, only the kramers. Because of limited back up SDI converters, this complicated the setup massively. Looking through the documentation of the Xvision, it is beyond my why they were unable to carry the signal. I am thinking it has something to do with the refresh rate of my computer’s outputs, but I am unsure. The XGA Christie 10ks took signal from anything we threw at them, only the Barcos had this problem.
I have a suspicion my solution here might be a Datapath x4 for future events.
This is a lot to read, but I am hoping one of the video superpowers of this forum (Oaktown?) might be able to shine some light on underlying issues. I’d like to take this as an opportunity to broaden my knowledge of the equipment so that I can go into similar situations with more foresight.
Here’s a rough diagram of the pipeline that failed.
https://imgur.com/a/l1ABy
Thanks!