Sun, 19 Nov 2006 12:00am

Event | MBD's 'Autumn' / Multi-screen Video

Leicester theatre company Metro-Boulot-Dodo's latest show/installation finished its run at the City Gallery in Leicester last month.

Paul from the company brought me in to help with some of the video work on the project. In particular he wanted me to create a patch in Max/MSP that would allow up to five video projected screens to be controlled via a MIDI sequencer. This was quite an interesting challenge - especially since the computer they wanted to use for the task was a fairly old PowerMac G4.

Controlling the playback of videos in Max is very straightforward using the Jitter extensions together with the standard MIDI functions. However, the five screens was a bit of an unknown. While Macintoshes can happily drive multiple screens, how would the G4 cope?

In the end I found that adding a couple of dual-monitor Radeon 9200 (Mac Edition) cards together with an exsting single-monitor card I already had work pretty well.

While the older Mac was not able to run high-resolution video simultaneously on each screen, it was quite happy running medium resolution video on 2 or 3 of the 5 screens at once and showing stills on the others.

It proved to be a useful experience, and everything seemed to work well during the six week run of the show. The next challenge for me, though, is coming up with a system that can drive three HD (high definition) video screens at once from a single computer for a piece of work I am planning...

Author: Sean Clark