This was a fun project that I took on at the end of the semester. Zodiaque Dance Company is The University at Buffalo’s premiere dance company and they were celebrating their 40th anniversary this year by inviting back alumni designers, dancers, and choreographers. In addition to this they also decided to have a large projection slideshow and movie about the history of the company. The projection designer developed a projection screen arrangement which consisted of 6 screens.
My job was to develop a system to control the projectors.
The Constraints:
The six projectors had to display different things on different screens at different times.
All projectors needed to be controlled from one computer.
Content need to be able to be edited quickly during tech.
And as always, make it as cheap as possible.
The solution I came up with was to use 3 computers, all running QLab 3. Two of them actually had projectors attached, the other was the master computer to keep them in sync. The two remote computers have the content on their local drives and loaded into a cue stack on cue lab.
The master computer sends out OSC commands to the remote computers to play the slideshows or videos.
OSC commands are interpreted and the cues are executed by the remote computers.
Check out the Signal Path here.
The 2 remote computers monitors could be seen from the master computer via screen sharing over the network.
This system was used in lieu of purchasing expensive software and media servers which run upwards of $60,000. We ended up only renting the projectors and the VGA cable runs.