this is giving me a panic attack
in addition to the geffen hard switcher (which is awesome and I highly recommend it) I recently purchased a blackmagic atem tv studio for my new setup...
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/produc ... sionstudio
this little dood can take 4 simultaneous full hd hdmi or sdi sources and mix between two of them.
it also has a handy little hdmi monitor out to which I had connected a nifty portable 15in hdmi monitor which is no bigger than a macbook pro ( i think its a gechic)
it does not do the elegant additive blendmode like toby got the spark to do... but it does the trick...
some have hooked it up to midi by way of an osc bridge and a little app off github ( i didnt have time to test before my show)
the ipad app was an abysmal failure which sucked up a good deal of my time and drove me crazy... it constantly disconnected but when it worked it was nice. obviously a dedicated hardware fader would be key here and I am sure since one person sorted it out that someone else will...
the great thing about this piece is that it JUST WORKS OUT OF THE BOX... no shitty 1980 style menu to flop through... and most importantly... a true 1-1 pixel ratio... meaning all your LED pixel maps will remain as true as if you were plugged in to the processors direct...
now there are downsides...
latency... if it were just computer>atem>processor it wouldnt be so bad... unfortunately for me it was computer>atem>imageproFOH>imageproONSTAGE...
this was not by my design or request it is just what was set up and time did not allot for me to pull everything apart and fix it... it was minimal for sure... but I was running 4 live camera feeds and it was noticable and annoyed me to no end... I feel if the stupid image pro's werent inline ( most likely the LED tech had even more than one inline onstage as well) it wouldnt have been so bad... but... i will solve that soon enough...
it could have also been because of my capture card (balckmagic decklink quad in an external thunderbolt enclosure) but again... more testing is needed
so... long winded but. I use the geffen and now the ATEM as well, depending on what I am doing and why.
I do own a couple sparks but for some reason I just cant get that 1-1 pixel ratio... the tv one also degrades the image... One day I will take it out for a proper test photo shoot to demonstrate this.
that being said I use the spark from time to time for fun with projector setups where pixelmaps arent an issue... the quality loss also seems less noticeable on beamers... why i couldnt tell ya