Mac Hardware for Multiple channel Video Installation
I am building an installation to play across 7 HD 1080p monitors.
The monitors will be synced, produce their own sound, and each individual video respond dynamically to proximity sensors located beneath them. Video manipulation controlled by the sensors will be somewhat minimal (ie no super heavy compositing or visual effects). The sensors will primarily be used to control video selection/transitions (ie custom wipes).
Because of the heavy processing power needed to run the 1080p video, I've been assuming that I will need dedicated computers for each of the monitors for the installation to run smoothly. I have 2 intel mac minis right now, and I was going to look into acquiring 5 more for the installation. However, due to financial restraints, I'm curious out other possibilities.
One idea I have would be to use the Mac Pro tower I currently have (Mac Pro Quad-core Xeon 5100, MacPro1.1) I would install 4 ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics cards [http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Apple/6615718/] and have each run to two monitors (7 installation monitors, and 1 behind the scenes screen to monitor the program. I would also procure 8 separate hard drives so that each would have a dedicated video source.
To the best of your knowledge, will there be enough power in this system for the installation to run smoothly? I really don't know how much of the processing responsibility falls onto the CPUs and how much on the GPUs in a setup like this. I'd imagine that if the CPUs handle the brunt of the load, than splitting between 7 or 8 monitors in a situation like this would not be feasible. However, if the majority of the processing falls onto the GPUs then I'm imagining this might be enough to pull it off.
Any help, or workaround recommendations would be most appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
Dustin
7 1080p monitors is quite a big ask.
I think you can get 3 monitors from high end radeon cards like that one.
Plus 4 5770's might cost more than several computers running one monitor each.
Or you could borrow some comps from friends.
yeah save yourself the headache man. your not going to get much out of 7 on one machine. i really wouldn't recommend more than two or 3 if your doing much processing on content at all. Ive tried 4 by 1080 and the patch has to be super efficient; almost all ui offloaded to touch screen and everything uyvy and i even broke some stuff out and used local ip to try and balance across threads. struggled to hold 30fps. you stand a much better chance at that res if everything your doing is generative than if your trying to read that much content from a drive. pulling from disk bus and then working can be ruthless at that res. really do your homework on codecs for your system. photo jpeg/animation/pro-res
If you need a hand with syncing multiple quicktimes, you can take a look at the guts of MultiScreener. http://www.zachpoff.com/software/multiscreener
99% of the code is just the boring stuff like managing prefs, user-inteface, etc. (It's packaged as an app for non-max-users, and the source patches are included.)
My experiences with HD playback are inline with the other posts. Th newish mac minis are great, probably capable of 2x 1080 streams if there is no other processing. This assumes that you are breaking the load into 2 entirely different apps so the OS can do proper threading.
@zlp Thanks for sharing this! Have you considered adding it to the Projects or Toolbox section?
Thanks for the responses.
@I3vidius, I am fairly new to all this, can you (or someone else) clarify what you mean by "optimize the compression of your material for their internal diskspeed and the igp graphics card," or point me to a resource where I can learn more about this.
@zlp Multiscreener is an incredible app!!! I've used it on several installations. It's been a godsend to video artists like myself with limited programming experience. I am actually using it right now to sync video content between 2 newer mac minis (purchased May 2010). I've played around with the inside of the program before, and as a MAX newbie, found myself pretty overwhelmed trying to navigate the code. Glad to know so much of it isn't integral to the actual syncing process, as I was planning to work with it again as a foundation for my next project.
In the installation I have running now, I am sending video to 7 screens with the help of 2 TripleHead2Go units. The 7th screen is an HD 720p monitor. The computer had trouble handling the outputs of the 720p video in addition to the large video split by the triple head unit (2400x600) when played with its original codec @ 30fps. However, once I switched to the recommended codecs and frame rate (photo jpeg, 15fps) the playback smoothed out.
For the new installation I am building, seeing how the two large videos were pushing the limits of my system, I'm concerned with how the same machine would handle 2 1080 videos, while adding additional realtime processing within MAX. I think the answer right now is to get the patch running working with the two mac minis I have at the moment. With that I can see how they handle both 2, and 4 screen arrays.
I think I3vidius was referring to the relative slowness of the 2.5" "laptop" drive a inside Mac Mini (which you could alleviate by using an external FW800 drive). "igp graphics chips" refers to the awful Intel GPUs included with the first few generations of Mac Mini. Your newer minis have much better hardware, so your photojpeg or prores footage is considered "optimized". And sorry about the lack of comments inside the MultiScreener patches. It takes me a minute to figure it out every time I open those things!
Good luck.
As mentioned elsewhere on the forums, several people have had the best luck using Pro Res 422 codec with these large frame sizes. I recommend doing some tests on the target hardware to see what sorts of optimizations are necessary. Disk speed and bandwidth can often be an issue with high definition video, so it's very plausible that you will need to use external drives.