2 mini macs or 1 mac pro?

[Dan_theatre]

Hi, Just thought we'd put this out there for some advice. Our Christmas show requires the running of LX, sound playback and Video across two projectors by one operator! We are pushing to get some capital investment in hardware to make this happen.

 

We will be running Qlab for audio and cueing a congo by midi. We have two options on the table at the moment.

 

option A) run two mini macs (2.4 Ghz dual core with 2GB RAM) one running Qlab for Sound and LX and another running Video, maybe somehow sync'd to the first.

 

option B) run one Mac Pro tower (probably 2.8Ghz Quad core with 3GB RAM) this would run Sound, LX via Midi and the visuals all through Qlab.

 

Whilst I know none of these are ideal, we are very limited in options. We'd love to run LX and Sound from one and run soething else as a media server with say Arkaos, but we cant <_<

Does anyone have any advice one way or another?

Has anyone used Qlab to run all 3 on one machine? I know it's designed to do so but will it all fall to bits unless we have a £4000 machine?

 

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

[nplatt]

Hi, Just thought we'd put this out there for some advice. Our Christmas show requires the running of LX, sound playback and Video across two projectors by one operator! We are pushing to get some capital investment in hardware to make this happen.

 

We will be running Qlab for audio and cueing a congo by midi. We have two options on the table at the moment.

 

option A) run two mini macs (2.4 Ghz dual core with 2GB RAM) one running Qlab for Sound and LX and another running Video, maybe somehow sync'd to the first.

 

option B) run one Mac Pro tower (probably 2.8Ghz Quad core with 3GB RAM) this would run Sound, LX via Midi and the visuals all through Qlab.

 

Whilst I know none of these are ideal, we are very limited in options. We'd love to run LX and Sound from one and run soething else as a media server with say Arkaos, but we cant <_<

Does anyone have any advice one way or another?

Has anyone used Qlab to run all 3 on one machine? I know it's designed to do so but will it all fall to bits unless we have a £4000 machine?

 

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

 

 

I can't comment on the software and I don't really like Mac’s, but my 2p would always be run it on as many machines as is possible. At least that way if one fails you only loses one element rather than everything stopping.

[Dj Dunc]

I can safely say that QLab WILL Run Sound and Video and fire Midi for a congo. NOTE: When we did this exact setup (firing off a macbook pro) The congo was somewhat iffy with the midi commands when multiples go commands were fired within a second. It needed to preload the midi cues and then make sure its running MSC. In the end we used two ops for the show rather than running all three from a Macbook Pro. More investigation needed.

[neilalexrose]

Get two mini macs, and run the show from one, and use the other as a tracking backup. Qlab can handle running sound, midi and visuals quite easily. (make sure you remember to stop all the video and visual cues - that's what eats up all the processing power and causes crashes!)

Most pro shows run two machines in this way, quite often never needing the backup machine, but it's always reassuring to know it's there.

Stage sound services send out mini mac rigs all the time, so if you want to try out a rig, why don't you hire one from them for a week. I believe they tend to send out mac pro's when running catalyst.

I ran sound effects and click track on Qlab 1 last year. There were a few problems, but that was mainly due to the F8 midi footswitch unit playing up. Audio wise it worked avery time!

Neil

[gareth]

Having been long-time users of SFX running on PCs for our sound needs, we've recently invested in some Macs and the Qlab software. I don't think we'll be making a wholesale switch in the near future, but I can tell you that one of our small-scale shows earlier this year involved Qlab on a Mac Pro running both sound and video (two projectors as well as preview and desktop monitors, running from the Mac's internal video card and a Matrox triple-head external card) - the system worked very well, and was a great deal better and more integrated than the way in which we'd have had to run a similar show before our investment in Qlab. So my suggestion would be Qlab on a Mac Pro, triggering your LX desk through MIDI.

[chelgrian]

Hi, Just thought we'd put this out there for some advice. Our Christmas show requires the running of LX, sound playback and Video across two projectors by one operator! We are pushing to get some capital investment in hardware to make this happen.

 

In terms of computing power a single Mini would be fine however if you require two different video streams on two outputs you'll need to use both of the outputs on a Mini to achieve this. In order to be able to see the QLab UI you'd then need a USB video dongle thing to provide a third display. While some people have done this I'm not sure I'd recommend it in a show situation. A Mac Pro with two video cards would be a better system.

 

The two mini route would require two QLab licenses and mean you had to fire one copy of QLab off the other machine via MIDI this can be done using MIDI over Ethernet or even physical MIDI.

 

I highly recommend you join the QLab mailing list and ask your questions there.

[dbuckley]

Whilst I know none of these are ideal, we are very limited in options. We'd love to run LX and Sound from one and run soething else as a media server with say Arkaos, but we cant <_<

Why can't you do that?

 

Alternatively, there is the dark side: You could throw all that stuff in the bin and get a PC (or a Mac running Windows if the box has to be white) with ShowMagic AV which will do it all in one integrated package. I've done multi-channel audio playback, one video projector, and lighting using PCStage on a 1.2GHz lappie that's nearly ten years old and no guts were busted.

[Dj Dunc]

For multipurpose screenage from a single video output, I highly reccomend the Matrox Double and TripleHead2Go Products. They are easy to set up once you get it recognised and can get you 2 / 3 additional screens to play with!!!

[TomHoward]

We have a setup exactly like this in our theatre, originally based around an Older Mac Mini (about the 2008 model I think) with the single DVI out - ours runs 32 channel sound out of it for multitrack playback, and we also use it as a recording rig (with alternative software to QLab).

 

About a year ago we wanted to add visuals to it, which proved a little difficult, as ours only has the one output. I looked at the options available - whether we could buy a Mac Pro, or whether we could add a Matrox Double or Triple head DVI unit, but given that this would be running everything off one Mini, we split it down and added a second, older (think G4) Mac with a double DVI graphics card. We then sync the double head video Mac to the first using MIDI cues, so when one fires it fires the second Mac. Currently this gives us one video output, having a local output on the video Mac as well. You could run video to both outputs and not have a local output on it, control it entirely via MIDI, but this seems a bit risky to me. Personally I'm thinking of adding a double/triple head to the second output on the Video Mac to give more outputs from where we are now.