12 inputs needed.

[jim_accucap]

Hi all,

Need a little help on a project.... i need 12 HD inputs.

1) Any way to run this on ventuz without seriously crashing / lagging
2) any ideas of Equipment to use to capture 12 HD Inputs?

Kind Regards

Jim

[Christian Krix Schmidt]

I don't think so. Getting the inputs in your machine could be possible by using Deltacast video boards. Either one with 8 inputs and one with 4 or three cards with 4 inputs. But the real bottleneck lies after the input I think. You have to process these inputs after all. There are dedicated video processing systems like a Christie Spyder or Barco Encore that are used for jobs like these. So I would consider alternative routes to make your life easier, the budget realistic and the whole thing manageable on a "normal" super workstation.

On what kind of output screen would you display 12 HD signals? You would need a minimum resolution of 25 megapixels (e.g. 7680 x 3240 pixels) to display all of them at their native resolution at the same time. Is that really ever going to be the case? Do you actually have a display setup that can display that?

Chances are high that is not even the case. So the 12x FullHD inputs are actually overkill. So there are few ways of taking that to your advantage. Reduce to the resolution to 720p for the inputs for example. That will greatly reduce the overall bandwidth. You probably have to display one or two inputs in full resolution at one point or another. So why not build an intelligent switching system. Maybe combine all 12 signals in one or two HD signal for preview purposes and have two additional inputs for whichever "channel" you want to show full res. You then control an external switcher to switch from all 12 full hd signals to only the one or two you actually have to show in full res. This way you could show all 12 signals at the same time as thumbnails together with 2 full res ones. And you would only need 4 inputs.

I am not a video technician so I don't know which external video processing units you would need to pull that off but I know it would work.

[jim_accucap]

Hi Christian,

Thanks for the feedback... i was looking at the TV One c3-540 video processor and doing it exactly the way you mentioned. Only thing is that we have never worked with TV one products before so we are not sure if we can control the switching using ventuz.

Our scenario is as such.

We have 12 inputs from 12 separate application workstation. ( All of these are HD ) All of these are then fed to a video processor/switcher/scaler. From there i was thinking of creating a preview screen with 12 displays tiled into a mosaic of 4 x 3 . Then pump that out as 1 preview which is then taken by my ventuz server.

On ventuz side, we are doing a rear projection w touch inputs where users can see & manipulate these screens via touch. Projector is only full HD. They can move the 12 feeds around and zoom to increase the size via touch gestures. As you mentioned, at some point i will need to switch from the lo-res to a full HD stream covering the projection screen.

I suppose the challenge is then to send a signal to the processor to change maybe output 2 to HD. Do you know how that is done? ie sending commands to a video processor to change the outputs?

if i configure it this way, i push the inputs down to 2 and hopefully eliminate the bottleneck?

[Andre Bellmann]

Hey Jim,

wrote you an e-mail regarding your question !

Cheers
A

[Christian Krix Schmidt]

If you only have two inputs you will be fine for sure. No bottleneck there at all.
As for controlling the video processor. That depends on the processors capabilities I guess. We did control a Barco Encore via serial and TCP directly from Ventuz. I am sure other processors have that capability as well. They might not have the features of an Encore but switching video channels should be doable. In any case, Ventuz has all the functionality build in for bi-directional communication with external equipment.