An 'interresting' setup.

[welsmore]

In our case, we ran everything past the Mac purely digitally. DP out from the mac to the DualHead and DP->DVI cables into the Monitors or Projectors (as both support DVI).

 

So I've not tried either of those conversions, though some Googling suggests that converting the DP outputs to VGA is possible for about £20 per side and supported by Matrox. I so have my doubts of how easy that is in practise though - I sadly suspect it's one of those cases where you have to buy all the bits and bring them together to see if it will actually work as promised.

[Ian H]

Dual or Triple head to go are been given a good kicking by the new X4 from Datapath. 4 DVI outputs and you can rotate and scale each output.

 

very interesting.... if slightly noisy......f***ing fan....

 

Ian

[AHYoung]

comparing the 2 is a bit apples and oranges... the matrox can be slightly infuriating and doesnt do scaling , overlaps or rotation, but look at the price difference between the 2 units. Its worth pointing out that both the matrox { but not the DP version} and X4 spit out proper analouge vga out of ther dvi - I outs irrespective of the input. this is important as some people , im looking at you apple, seem to think that generic DVI means digital only.

[RuinExplorer]

A bit of clarification, some projectors can be mounted on their side. This is known as portrait mode. Both Christie and Barco fully support some models in this fashion and will not invalidate warranties by setting them in this fashion. We just used the Barco FLM HD20 in this manner about two weeks ago for an event, supported by a Barco dealer.

 

That being said, I don't think that this would be the best option for the OP. I would agree that the overscan of the side screens by a standard mounting would be best for the OP. I know of many schools who will use Qlab for this type of set-up running on a Mac with a Matrox TripleHead2Go. For Qlab, the educational license is about $1 USD/day, which allows for longer learning curve. You can go here to learn about the video portion of the program: http://figure53.com/qlab/documentation/videocue.php

[cho_drummer]

Sorry to ressurect this topic. Just thought it'd be useful to do so for anyone looking into doing this with no budget in the future.

 

I managed to pull it off sucessfully. We had 3 projectors set up. The two side projectors overscanned the screens and I masked off the projector lens as best I could so that only the area of the screen was being projected onto in each case.

 

To send video & VT to the screens I used a Panasonic AVE-5. If you're familiar with these desks, you'll know they're pretty cheap but I've found them to be very versatile if you need them to be (or can't afford anything better).

Essentially I sent the main output to the main screen then I sent the side screens the feed from Rec out 1&2. The desk gives me the option to change the feed sent to Rec 1&2 as opposed to the main out. Therefore I could have my cameras in Channel A and my animations/VT's running on channel B. I could set the output of Rec 1&2 to 'B' and then use live cameras on channel A. I used a cheap 3-1 video or A/V switcher. (£3 on ebay, usually used for switching various sources into a TV, such as console, DVD player etc.) The A/V switcher was placed before the input of channel A so I could have 2 cameras running on channel A. I also used a switcher before channel B which had the VT feed (computuer via scan converter) and a 3rd camera.

 

I was then able to opperate the 3 screens in a way which displayed the same on all screens or a different thing on the side screens to the centre screen, be that VT on the sides and cameras in the middle, different camera angles on the middle screen to the side screen or VT on the middle screen and cameras on the sides. It really worked quite well. It was slightly confusing to understand at first but, if you're ever in a no budget situation and you have to pull something like this off, the method I've highlighted is a good solid solution.

 

Cheers,

Chris.