Tuesday, August 4, 2009

video drops....

The Video drops we created for this past weekend services at @wcrossing were pretty easy and gave us the visual punch I was hoping for. While we do a lot of enviormental and creative projection, it was the first time we did it like this.

We flew three 60 inch wide verticle drops of 50# pound white paper. Got the paper from a school supply store and seemed to be the perfect weight and size for this application in our room.
We set three of our Eiki EIP-5000 projectors focused for each of the drops. We found that one of the projectors could cover to of the drops so we went from needing four projectors to accomplish the Video Drops and some other projection effects down to three. It was all easy from there. We connected the two projectors up to the Matrox Triple Head 2 Go 'Digital Edition'. While we didnt need the full potential of the Matrox T2G unit because we were only using the 2 projectors for the Drops I wanted to go ahead and put it to use since it was a new toy for us. We ran the projectors through the Matrox with a Mac Book Pro running ProPresenter.

That was fun for me, just for the simple fact that we have been locking up three Macs to do the same thing. This $300 device is freeing up several thousand dollars of computers.

Our content creator then came in connected his laptop up to each projector and masked out the area we did not to project on. We took the motion loops we used (most of them we get through Worship House Media) for the weekend and cut them into thirds and centered them up in the unmasked part and created a 3072x768 file and played back in ProPresenter.

Here are some pics from the weekend services.... oh, yea - everything else in the service was pretty amazing, the video drops were just icing on the cake!




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2 Comments:

Blogger Mark Manley said...

Bill - this is fascinating stuff. I'm designing a triple-projection solution now for my church and I'm thinking a lot about content. You mentioned "chopping up the video into thirds" - but if you're starting from a 16:9 or 4:3 clip, doesn't that mean the resulting clips are not of the correct format or are you stretching them? Any tips you could give in this area will save us TONS of experimentation. Thanks and great work!

August 18, 2009 at 12:42 AM  
Blogger Bill Swaringim said...

Mark:
email me at bill@billswaringim.com and we can chat more about the setup

August 19, 2009 at 8:01 AM  

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