projecting onto a building

[Terry-VPM]

Myself and a few friends are getting into video projection onto a building and have put together a 15 minute video (mp4). Our problem is that our set of (Photoshop) masks of the building's features were created from a photograph of the building and we have since discovered that (in reality) the projected image doesn't line up everywhere that it is supposed to. It appears that the slightly converging verticals on the photo were straightened but the H to W ratio of the result ended up a bit wrong! which of course affected all the masks.

We have been told that Arena is the way to fix this. Is it possible to simply(!?) drop the video into Arena and warp the image to fit the building? If so, does it save the output as a stand-alone(?) corrected video, or do we project directly from Arena?

Thanks in advance to all responses, - much appreciated.

[pfelberg]

The better the quality of the original photo and the better the mask details you designed and cleaned up from the photograph, even adjusting convergin lines, the better. You know that already.
That being said, yes it is possible to adjust minor or medium distortions while projection mapping from Arena.
You can add more points, subdividing your slices and pushing and moving here and there.

[Terry-VPM]

Thanks Pfelberg,
As you say "...yes it is possible to adjust minor or medium distortions while projection mapping from Arena".
What I am not totally clear about is that once mapping corrections have been made do we use Arena for final (public) projection of the "show" or can we render and save the corrected version as a video (mp4) file that could be projected via (say) WMP or VLC etc.

Thanks again for your interest.

[Empyfree]

You (kind of) have both options!

Within Arena you’d be looking at presenting “live” from Arena, there’s no internal way of recording the warped output.

You can of course use an external recorder (hyperdeck etc) to record once and then playback from hardware.

[Terry-VPM]

Thanks Empyfree much appreciated.