I've been asked to help put together some video projections to accompany an opera. The budget is minuscule and it all has to be done on the cheap, so no renting fancy video switchers, etc.
The set designer is planning on three screens. The screens will show stills and moving images at various times. He wants smooth dissolves or other transitions from one scene to the next. This differs from a regular video presentation in that the projections have to be cued to the action on the stage, so there needs to be a way of controlling the advancement from scene to scene. It seems to me there are two basic approaches:
1. Have three computers, one for each video projector. I have one anemic laptop PC I could throw at this, and probably can borrow a couple of others. Does anyone have an idea of what video formats are easiest to display?
2. Use DVD players. Like, three identical $50 players, with a chapter mark at the beginning of each scene. If the players were stacked, one remote control could operate all three. The main disadvantage I see to this is that all the players I've seen display a chapter number on the screen while advancing, so I'd have to find a player that puts this display at the top of the screen and mask that part of the image off. For my Sony player, this would lose about 15% of the image. Another smaller issue is that during a chapter skip a DVD player shows a line-doubled field of the last image, so the transition will be slightly noticeable.
If I make DVDs, how long can they run and still have highest quality? Do still images take much less space to store? I'd like to get 2 hours or so on each DVD to make sure there's plenty of time for each scene.
This is such a great group! I'm hoping someone out there has been through this sort of thing and can offer some advice.
Jeremy
The set designer is planning on three screens. The screens will show stills and moving images at various times. He wants smooth dissolves or other transitions from one scene to the next. This differs from a regular video presentation in that the projections have to be cued to the action on the stage, so there needs to be a way of controlling the advancement from scene to scene. It seems to me there are two basic approaches:
1. Have three computers, one for each video projector. I have one anemic laptop PC I could throw at this, and probably can borrow a couple of others. Does anyone have an idea of what video formats are easiest to display?
2. Use DVD players. Like, three identical $50 players, with a chapter mark at the beginning of each scene. If the players were stacked, one remote control could operate all three. The main disadvantage I see to this is that all the players I've seen display a chapter number on the screen while advancing, so I'd have to find a player that puts this display at the top of the screen and mask that part of the image off. For my Sony player, this would lose about 15% of the image. Another smaller issue is that during a chapter skip a DVD player shows a line-doubled field of the last image, so the transition will be slightly noticeable.
If I make DVDs, how long can they run and still have highest quality? Do still images take much less space to store? I'd like to get 2 hours or so on each DVD to make sure there's plenty of time for each scene.
This is such a great group! I'm hoping someone out there has been through this sort of thing and can offer some advice.
Jeremy