Arena 5.0 blending issue

[Supernova]

Hi, first off, the new warping/blending additions in Arena 5.0 are amazing.
I have found one bug though. Hopefully it can be fixed soon.

When I set up a widescreen with multiple blend zones there is a problem with the adjustments, for this example let's say that the screen is three projectors wide with two blend zones. The problem is that in Arena 5.0, any adjustments to one blend zone now affect all of the others. Even if one zone is turned off, an adjustment is made to the other, then the first zone is turned back on, the changes will still be applied to it.

For example: The three projector blend is aligned, the soft edge is turned on for zone 1 and 2. Zone 2 looks perfect immediately, but zone 1 is a little off. A small tweak (to the red gamma for instance) does the trick and zone 1 looks great, however, now zone 2 is red because the adjustment affected it too.

Kind of a problem for multi blend applications.

Keep me posted, hopefully this will be an easy fix.

Thanks!

-Brandon

[Oaktown]

Hey Supernova, I just did some testing and I'm getting the same problem. I haven't used R5 with more than 2 blended projectors yet which didn't exemplify this issue but I agree with you that this glitch makes R5 impossible to use in production for 2+ blend areas.

A couple more problems to report:

• The way power and luminance currently work doesn't seem to make sense either since it's being mirrored on 2+ parts of the blend instead of giving the ability to adjust these parameters independently.
  The blended area still switches to the wrong area when trying to create wide blends

.
As far as I see it, we should be able to select each blend area as a subsection of the screen it belongs to and adjust each one individually so if a screen has two blend areas, we could select Right/Left or Top/Bottom blend area independently for both its blend counterpart on the other screen.

Now that certainly become a bit more complicated if you blend four projectors 2Wx2H since there is a blend area that is common to all 4. In order to make unnoticeable blends, I think it's important to have complete granular control of each section especially when one deals with more than 2 projectors in a blend section. So, in the case a 2Wx2H setup, there would be 3 independent blend section per projector for a total of 12.

That would allow us to finely tune gammas/luminance/power for each projector's blend area.

[Joris]

Resolume 4 used a system where each blend is controlled by the individual blend controls of the two slices that make up the blend.

This had the problem that a slice blended on two sides has only one set of controls for each blend. So adjusting the blend settings for the left side blend would also affect the blend settings for the right side blend. All in all it was workeable, but it wasn't ideal.

For some reason, we tried to make this system smarter by 'mirroring' the controls, so there is only set of values per blend. This apparently also gives the problem described in this thread.

We're going to revert the behaviour to the Res 4 behaviour.

In the long run, we might need to come up with a system where each blend area has its own settings. Oaktown, am I correct in understanding that you would like this blend area to then be further divided into individual controls for each projector making up the blend?

[Oaktown]

In the long run, we might need to come up with a system where each blend area has its own settings. Oaktown, am I correct in understanding that you would like this blend area to then be further divided into individual controls for each projector making up the blend?

Yes that would be my preference since a blend is the result of 2, 3 or 4 projectors and projectors are never equal in the colors so I think having granular control of each blend would be the best.

I'd also like the ability to turn off blends individually or as a group so that I can first match the colors on the projectors without any add'l information.

[chenthemagician]

+1 on Oaktown's suggestion

[elgarf]

+1 on Oaktown's suggestion

Can it be more simple to blend screens, not slices? For example each screen can contain group of 4 controllers for each edge, which can be enabled by clicking on checkboxes. So I can control each side of screen.

It's no more needing to blend slices, because we have awesome virtual screen feature.

[Supernova]

I wouldn't change it to screens, the slices works just fine. What I have seen work really well on another system that I use is that each output that is part of a blend (or each slice in this case) defaults to connected control with the other slice that is part of that blend so overall changes can be made. There is also a check box which reads "make changes on adjacent output". If that is then unchecked, then individual adjustments can be made to either side. After changes have been made that box can be checked again, both sides will retain their individual changes, but can now also have group changes applied again.
But these changes always only affect the 1 blend region that is currently being adjusted. Never, would there need to be a reason to adjust multiple blend regions at the same time.

[Supernova]

Also, Oaktown- You can already turn off blending on individual projectors in Arena. Just go into Output>Advanced>pick a slice and uncheck "Soft Edge". You can go through and turn off all the blend regions this way, or just individual sides, which can be handy for trouble shooting alignment sometimes.

[Oaktown]

I wouldn't change it to screens, the slices works just fine.

I personally think that blending screens makes more sense since slices are part of screens and screens are assigned to physical outputs directly. Blending screen would allow to reduce the amount of blending since any slice that overlaps two, three of four screens would be in the blend zone.

[Zoltán]

I personally think that blending screens makes more sense since slices are part of screens and screens are assigned to physical outputs directly. Blending screen would allow to reduce the amount of blending since any slice that overlaps two, three of four screens would be in the blend zone.

you could do this using virtual outputs routed to slices.

I have done multiple slice blending with two projectors, where each blend was in different distance from the projectors. So please keep the slice blending!
This was back on R4, and because this projection was on a rotating stage - with the scenery positions changing between scenes, the output blends were sometimes overlapping.