One Projector - 3 surfaces - Different parts of a single video to be split out across the 3 surfaces… Any ideas?

[neakmenter]

Hi! First post here.

I know there's been similar questions - they kinda ended up with MadMapper being most people's answer - but I'm wondering if there's any way to do this all in QLab…?

I've got a video that's been running in Catalyst Media Server as a single layer, which has then been pumped out to 3 of Cat's "mixes" with an offset and scale so they only pick up their part of the content. The mixes are then shifted about on the projector's output to matchup with the 3 different size hanging screens. works great to split this 3 ways onto the different screens. but...

I want to move the production to QLab (cos it's great and will do the audio and midi cues too and get this stuff out of lampy world…)

Soooo… Closest I've come in QLab to this is using the Virtual Screens split 3 ways - but this means that I can only map my content to exactly each 1/3 of the projector output. Not great. My hanging projector screens are different sizes remember!

Another option, which seems closest to the recommended, is to have 3 surfaces, all outputting to the same projector, which works great! Except! I want to send the same video content to each surface (just different bits of it). Can't do that in QLab - and I don't want to have the darn thing simultaneously running 3 cues with the same video file being mashed at whilst simultaneously hammering out multi channel audio! I've tried this and it's a pain. Also if I need to swap out any videos it gets very messy...

So - am I missing something - is there not just a simple way I can send a single video to multiple surfaces? (which happen to be cropped to different bits of the output)

and if not, anyone reckon if the lovely people at QLab could implement this. They're more than halfway there with the virtual screens thing - just needs to be less restrictive on where on the final output display these virtual screens sit!

Thanks guys. Sorry for the nooobie rant… :)

[Drew Perry]

I'm slightly confused - do you have one single projector? or three projectors for three screens? 

If it's a single projector surely you just need to add a mask?

Perhaps a photo of your set or how it's working in Catalyst might clear things up.

Drew

[Drew Schmidt]

You're correct in your assessment. 

Because you can only add a projector to a surface once, you either need to ...

 - Create three surfaces and therefore three subsequent cues for each surface or ...

 - Use something like MadMapper which treats surfaces differently

Anything internal to Qlab that I can think of (i.e. Camera cues going into surfaces) quickly becomes convoluted. 

Personally I would do the triple surface solution. If you need to update the source of the video, overwrite the target file. I would likely do this by creating a folder just for the videos. Each video would be named with its corresponding cue number. Replace the file and you've updated Qlab. 

[Drew Perry]

You can add an output to more than one surface.

[Drew Schmidt]

Yes. Which is what it sounds like he's done. But because you cannot add the same output to a surface multiple times, he would need to create three separate surfaces. This means he would need a cue for each individual surface; undesirable in terms of workflow. Unless you overwrite the original file / target.