Mac Projection Software

[BigYinUK]

Hi all.

 

We're using an iMac and a DLP projector (or whatever is in-house) to show our visuals behind the band when we're playing.

 

Currently we're using (I think) VLC but the problem with this is that the play/pause/rewind etc controls show when the vids are being set up to go, which doesn't look very professional.

 

Without getting to complicated, is there a simple way around this? Ideally we want to keep this to a single Mac with either a DVI or VGA connection to the projector.

 

Regards

 

Jon

[J Pearce]

Qlab.

 

I believe basic video playback is included in the free version, access to bigger features is by purchasing or hiring a license. Hiring can be very economic and a useful way to shift the cost onto show budgets rather than venue costs.

[CallumP93]

Jon,

 

At work we recently used Millumin (http://www.millumin.com) for a modernised version of Romeo and Juliet to great effect. It comes with a months free trial and can either be purchased outright or rented on a day by day basis (I think its a minimum of a weeks rental though) We linked it to Qlab via MIDI to run layers as required. Looking through my photos of the show there doesn't seem to be any that show it the system in use, but we were projecting onto white cloths, which formed hourglass style shapes, so the shape mapping functionality worked very well on this.

 

Although we didn't need to in this show, you can feed camera layers into the software to include in projection.

 

 

Callum

[pjrails]

Hi Callum

 

Go for QLab.

it'll do all you want and more

 

 

PJ

[beware]

VLC on windows is very powerful when using command line options. I have a wrapper app I use to play videos fullscreen on the external monitor while showing controls on the primary. I assume the mac version has similar command line options.

 

Or just play with the preferences.

[soundiesam]

second vote for Qlab,

if your using any tracks in your show as well you would be able to run that off qlab and have it all synced up

[J Pearce]

You could get very enthusiastic and automate patch changes on keyboards and effects units too, or cue LX.

[AHYoung]

Just turn off the OSD in preferences, its the first option handily enough, right under it you will find the option to stop the file title displaying every time you hit play. If you want to play a number of videos and don't need to do any multi layer multi output warping etc etc, just use vlc, if you spend 10 minutes learning how it works and what the keyboard shortcuts are, its actually pretty powerful and stable, Theres a thousand other programmes that give you millions of options, but I cant see why you need anything other than stable video on demand with a black desktop in between files, and vlc does this .

[richieclare]

You can turn those displays off using the preferences. I'm assuming that you have an extended desktop set up. I do something similar on a win8 laptop. I have a playlist undocked on on my laptop screen and the VLC window on the 2nd screen. I double click on the video file I want to play in the playlist and it plays on the 2nd screen.