I attended a presentation for the Watchout System on October 25th and 25th. The system is for displaying seemless video across multiple monitors and produced by Dataton (http://dataton.com) from Sweden. The product has the functionality we need but has some pretty major limitations. I took some notes and here they are.
Watchout and Guide Maker Notes
Demonstrations of our new video projection system at SPL Integrated Solutions (http://splis.com/) in St. Paul they are responsible for a lot of the new AV equiptment in the new Walker.
David Branson from Show Sage (http://showsage.com/) actually gave the presentations. He mentioned being in the tradeshow/presentation biz for many years but it seems like his main gig now is to sell the Watchout system to executives who need splashy presentation or videowall software.
Our set up
- 5 projectors set to 60H at 1280*1024px
- 1 rack mounted PC connected to each projector from now on I’ll refer to them as a cluster
- 1 controller computer (this could be replaced by a control device later especially if there are multiple computers)
- 120 GB hard drive on each PC
- 1 Processor per computer
Our computers currently do not have video capture cards but we will probably buy some. If we do not get them that means no live streaming video
How Watchout works
The programming computer has all the media for a show on it. On the programming computer you create the timeline. Assign it to the displays through the displays IP number. When the show is updated it pushes the media each display computer needs out to the that computer (not every computer in the cluster gets all the media) The display computers in the cluster then treat the content. It makes two folders and two files. A media folder and an index file explaining its contents and a Cache folder and an index file describing it’s contents. The Media folder has the “Master Copy” of whatever is shown. The cache folder has the image cut up and tiled so that the display computer only has to keep a small part of the graphic in its graphic buffer. This allows really huge images to be moved around between screens and only a small bit of kept in memory at a time. It’s actually really smart.
It does a pretty good job scaling and moving graphics around. Both transparency and alpha channel from photoshop are respected. We better double check this because it seemed to premultiply the transparency with white when I brought a semi-transparent object into Watchout during a demo. We can bring in any type of file format but I think we will only probably use PNG, JPEG, TIFF and Photoshop but this is a bitmap program with no vector capabilities. Illustrator files need to be brought out to photoshop and saved. Flash files should be saved out to quicktimes. It will play Flash files but it does a bad job of it.
Here’s the big let down. It doesn’t do any slicing for video. The video stays in the Media folder. It just gets shown straight up and the whole thing is played by any display computer that has a little of the video. This means that if you have a video that is 3000px wide that it gets the full thing played at 3000px on every machine that uses it. It does play a wide range of video types. MPEG 2? and Windows Media 9 were recommended. However Quicktime animation compressor or Quicktime PNG compressor were recommended if we wanted an alpha channel on the movies.
Live Video Feeds
When/if we get live capture cards we can make shows that have live video as one of the elements. Every computer has to have capture card if it is going to play the video. So if one video is stretched across all 5 screens all 5 will need cards, but since every computer needs a card they all can take different feeds. So we could stream 5 different feeds on the front at once.
We can send a VNC signal to watch out and have it displayed as a video. Expect the frame rate to be about 5-10 fps. For a faster frame rate (40-60 fps) we could get a frame grabber card (that’s what he called it not me). He recommended Datapath (http://www.datapath.co.uk/home.htm) who makes a card that captures VGA (1600*1200 max) He said they make a dual head card for live video and VGA capture. But I didn’t find one on their site.
Publishing to the Cluster
You can schedule media in the watch out timeline. It does some animation and tweening. The Watchout timeline will let you move graphics and videos, change their transparency and scale. You can play sounds and fade them in and out. It is possible to play a full frame video on every machine. Our test at SPL actually failed but that may be because we had full frame Quicktimes the Watchout rep said that full frame MPEG 2? or Windows Media would work. We still have to test it.
The first time you open Watchout up it will check what media the display cluster has and it will push out the media that should be there. Every time you add media to the timeline you will have to push it out to the cluster. Every time you make a change in the animation you will have to push it out to the cluster. The Command D (Mac) and Control D (PC) keystrokes will push the timeline and media to the display cluster. Double clicking on media in your library will open it in it’s associated program (photoshop, quicktime etc) you can edit and save that media but Watchout won’t know about it until you refresh it. This is a command in the “Media” pull down or you can press Command R. After you refresh the media you still have to push it out to the display cluster with Command D.
The material in the cache folder and media folder accumulates between shows so it needs to be deleted once in a while. Possibly there could be a cleaning schedule set up with Guide Maker? and the drive will probably need some defrag schedule given the amount of media getting loaded and unloaded.
Special Layers
There is a layer type called standby. If you use a standby layer it fades to 100% when you set your movie to standby and fades back to 0% when you turn you take your movie out of standby. This can be helpful when we transition between movies or when we update the computers with new content or if we just want to pause the playback.
Conditional layers can be turned on and off when the show is loaded. There can be up to 30 conditional layers and their condition is Boolean. They are either on or off. The default is off. Every layer you include in the string that opens the timeline will be on, every other conditional layer is off. A conditional layer may not be turned off part way through a timeline.
Dynamic Content? There is no real way to get dynamic content from our database into Watchout since it doesn’t have anyway to render text or accept live images (besides video or VNC). Here was our first idea. If we push a PNG out to the production computer, then send it a refresh command via TCP and publish the movie it will push the PNG to the display cluster. Now this should work and we can generate a PNG from our DB or an Admin tool using a server side tool. The problem comes in that we will get some pretty funny results if the PNG is a different size than the one it animated before. So we would have to enforce certain dimensions (30 of them) and scale our words to those dimensions. A really short string could be in a conditional layer that loops a few times while a long string will be in a conditional layer that loops only once. That should let us get some very simple announcements up on the screen.
Just so we know the whole system. Our production computer is a G5 and will be on a separate VLAN. The G5 will have two network cards one to talk to the outside and one to talk to the Watchout world.
Possible future applications
The software seems to have been designed to be both a Super Media Powerpoint and a trade show video display. The presentation part of the software has some neat things built in. You have key commands to jump to parts of the timeline to show video or graphic animations.
It has the ability to pause and play looped animations for a time during a presentation so it could be used as an opening animation and soundtrack for a movie. It can transition off before another video feed starts.
When running this on a mac:
Make sure the firewall is off You have to install the driver for the USB key. Otherwise your computer will crash.
Things to watchout for:
- Previewing
So basically there is no preview built into Watchout. You have to run all previewing from the display cluster and back to some displays in order to really see anything. In our case we will have to mirror the displays and send one video signal to the projector and one signal to a set of LCD monitors so we can work while the projectors are off.
- Videos do not get cut up on the fly like graphics do. You have to cut them all up in the rendering process.
- native animation in watchout is limited at best. there is no rotation and the frame easing is weak and mechanical feeling.
- Only 10 undoes
- No Vector Files
- No hardware acceleration
- There is no real benefit from a powerful graphics card because everything is handled in the software and everything is 2D. This leaves all the hard work on the processor.
- No multiprocessor support This is really a problem since there is no hardware acceleration.
Guidemaker
This is a pretty simple scheduler. I actually zoned out through a part of his talk on this but everything is covered in the PDF about the software. It basically looks like you have buttons and actions that you can assign actions to and Actors that can do actions on a schedule. This program seems to simply send out commands via TCP to the clustered computers. There are some commands that he didn’t know about that we will have to look up.
Commands to Research More
- Load Show
- Remove Show
- Remove Cache
- Update Show
The Dataton website is a mess and it’s hard to find the download for the Mac version of Guidemaker. It is in fact in the touchDown (http://dataton.com/products/touchdownsida.html) area of the site.
Guidemaker can run on the same computer you are using to control your Watchout presentation. This means you can run and edit the presentation with one license of the software.
Guidemaker can talk to more than one cluster.
Guidemaker can talk to the control computer or can bypass the control computer and talk directly to the Cluster.