theater production setup

[Sportinger]

Hello everyone !

iam planing to setup a system for Resolum Arena. It will be used for theater produktions. I tryed to gather as much information about hardware an limitations as i could find, but i also would like to hear your professional oppinion about it.

This is what i want to do with it:

- min 4 cam inputs
- the ability to preview all cam feeds on seperate monitors
- mixing both HD signals and SD signals at the same time
- output on 4 differnt screens with different content at the same time
- output maximum in 1920x1080 for each screen

I want to film actions, like a talking face, which will be projektet on multiple screens with live effects. I need a very low delay for this, so that the sound of the voice is heard ether direktly or from low latency audiosystem. So i just cant have a noticable dealy between the Person which i see in real life, and the projektion.

i thought about a the Blackmagic decklink series. I also want to use, instead of a matrox tripple head, the MST device from club3d http://www.club-3d.com/index.php/produc ... b-1-3.html
does anyone have any experience with it ? I have learned that its only possible with AMD video cards, but i also noticed that nvidea has better perfomance... !?

Other questions:
- which type of CPU i7 or Xeon ?
- Video cards better in SLI mode or is one high end card more than enougth
- RAM, i heard due to 32bit resolum only takes 3GB. So 8 will be ok iguess ? does a faster ram will decrease delay ?
- if think about an SSD raid 0

So, i think it should all work out just fine, but the big question is the delay. I realy need someone telling me i can give it a shot, or i dont need to because the dealy will be noticable e.g. when someone is speaking live.

Thanks in advance, and please excuse my bad englisch

sincerely

Sportinger

[drazkers]

Why do you want to use resolume for theatre?

First Resolume only supports 1 video card at a time with promises of complete stability. SLI isn't supported and since dual GPU cards randomly crash I wouldn't suggest it.

Video delay shouldn't be an issue if you have a proper sound board to help.

I would also look at Isadora, as its actually built specifically for custom cue based theatre shows.

[Sportinger]

Hi drazkers,

Why wouldn't i ? Its the best balance between freedom and simplicity out there.
I do not only need to create the cues with alle effects and stuff, i need to teach my concept to someone who can do the shows on the system.

Even though SLI isn't supportet in Resolum, i dont know about the problems with dual GPU cards. I only know of the AMD7990 wich has 4x independent mini diplayports.
The other way would be to use a multi stream transport (MST) Hub, and i only know one product. It will splitt one displayport output v1.2 into 3 independent screens for windows with a resolution up to fullHD for each screen. Poorly, it will only work with AMD cards.

I ordert a Ultrastudio SDI for a dell and probably an Ultrastudio express for a macpro to check out latency on my own. I just read that it wil be hard to cope with multiple video inputs over thunderbolt and of course it wont work with usb3.0. But if this single input works in terms of delay, i hope i can be shure about the delay on a PCIe BM multiple input card like the decklink series.
Is it true that the PCIe bus speed depends on the chipset and the CPU and will affects the delay between BM cards and resolum, or is it unnoticable ?

Isadora looks great, but as i said i need a more intuitive solution.

[drazkers]

Biggest reason is transition time. Back when I did theatre being able to set your transition to match the board is kinda important. Hell you have multiple days set aside just to sort that out! You can't go from a 3 count to a 2 count in resolume for a specific cue. Are you going to have your operator manually change the transition timing when going from a 2 count to 3 count then to a snap to black?

Now you could program a cue system in max msp to control resolume, but then the point is kinda moot when its node based like Isadora. If you need something simpler I would say Qlab is the theatre standard for playback. Now I remember that gent awhile back who did that great train style theatre show with Resolume. Its not impossible, but I'm pretty darn sure your director isn't gonna be happy If you fade and snap times aren't always the same through Cue to Cue.

The 7990 will crash randomly on resolume, i've seen it and even experienced it when an overly excited tech swapped out my 7970 for 6990.(Days of pulling out my hair on a corp gig.)

I think the best tested card from AMD for Resolume is the ASUS HD 7970 DirectCU II
http://www.asus.com/Graphics_Cards/HD7970DC2T3GD5/ It has legit display ports which are 100x better because they lock.

The resolume guys have this card and don't have issues. Personally I found it made resolume crash prone, but I'm inclined to think I just had a bad card.

I use resolume every week and when it fits the parameters of the show. I think a lot of experienced guys on here would agree that forcing a software package to do something it wasn't built for is kinda silly(Realtime mixing software used for cue based multiweek playback.)

The Resolume guys have plans to expand into a cue system and timeline I believe. So resolume isn't gonna always be like this. I still like using resolume on corporate shows because the columns make great cues and fades are more lax. But if I was doing a 100 or 200 cue show I wouldn't use it because you'd be so inconsistent for transitions.