hello,
i have a dual screen patch running where i have a control panel on one monitor and some content running on the other. When i use the control panel the other screen stops playing, i need to click with the mouse or open and close the monitor window to make it active again so it plays.
Is this normal ?
bump 
looks like there could be a pause if you are editing in the network, depending on what you are doing. however, it shouldn’t stop playing. can you reproduce this behaviour with the default .toe file?
Selina
does the content panel stop playing or is it actually not displayed at all when you use your control panel?
hello and thx for your help …
it’s not the control panel that stops playing it’s the other screens.
Maybe is hould explain a bit more:
I have two sets of 4 monitors (each DVI port of my graphics card going into a splitter) so i have 8 monitors running at 1280x720. on one of the monitors i have my control panel, the other 7 are displaying animations. As soon as i use the control panel the 4 monitors on the other DVI port stop playing (the content is still displayed, paused at the frame where i clicked on the ctrl panel), the 3 monitors that are on the same DVI port than the control panel continue to play normally. For the other 4 monitors to resume playing i have to click once with the mouse anywhere on the screen of one of these monitors or to close and open the window comp for these monitors.
I also have another issue with a second computer that doesn’t have a ctrl panel, it’s a setup without controls where the .toe patch goes into full screen on all 8 monitors and starts playing when launched (autolaunhc sequence when computer starts). When i launch the patch everything goes into full screen and starts playing, but only 4 of the 8 monitors, one half is ‘paused’ on the first frame, once again i have to click on the paused monitors area with the mouse for these monitors to start playing as well. This is a big problem because i normally don’t have a mouse and keyboard connected, i need this patch to go fullscreen and start playing on both monitors when launched without user interaction.
I don’t quite understand this behavior, maybe there is a setting somewhere but i can’t figure out why this happens. The timeline continues to play normally as do the monitors that are on the same DVI port than the Ctrl Panel, somehow when i use the control panel (all made with TUIKs) the other DVI port becomes ‘inactive’.
The graphics cards are Geforce GTX 580’s.
i’m still trying to resolve this issue, any help would be greatly appreciated …
Just so I’m clear about your setup: You have 2 Geforce 580s in this system, each outputting 2 outputs to a splitter which results in 8 screens total, 4 per GPU. Is this correct? And you have a single window that covers your entire desktop, all 8 monitors?
If this is correct then unfortunately this setup will not work for you. You can’t use 2 Geforces to get OpenGL rendering across this many screens. This is something which Nvidia will only support using Quadros using either SLI Mosaic or GPU Affinity. You can go down to 1 580 (or a Geforce 590 to get 3 outputs) and use a different type of splitter like the DataPath X4 to get more outputs. But with Geforces you are limited to a single card only.
no, we have 2 workstations, each has one GTX580 with each DVI output of each card going into 2 datapathx4 splitters … resulting in a total of 16 monitors each running at 1280x720. The .toe on each computer has 2 window comps combining 4 monitors which are then sent out via the Monitor 0 and 1 ID’s (the two DVI outputs of the graphics card) at 2560x1440. The splitter then splits up each DVI into 4 DVI outputs going into the monitors.
What happens is that on the computer with the contrl panel, when i adjust anything there the second Monitor pauses, since the monitors are grouped into 4 (2560x1440) i can see that it’s the second other DVI out that pauses, the 3 monitors which are comped with the control panel screen continue to play. On the second computer (which is controled by the other machine over OSC and TouchIn/Out) we have erratic behavior, sometimes on startup one group is pause, and on both machines when you click with the mouse on one of the paused screens then playback resumes.
Ah ok, that should work then. Is it possible for you to send us a test case? You will get better performance if you use a single window that spans your entire desktop instead of 2 though, so doing that may fix the issue anyways. Just use a Container COMP and Select COMPs to join your 2 controlpanel/outputs into one big panel.
i’m not sure i can use a single spanned desktop of 5120x2880 with the Datapaths, i’ll have to check … that would also solve the issue i guess. i’ll try that in the meantime. But as it is now it’s still a bit weird and i really wonder where this is coming from. I’ll send you the patch so you can have a look.
The desktop is always one big canvas, even if it shows has 2 monitors in the settings. Set the ‘Area’ parameter of the Window COMP to ‘Desktop’ instead of ‘Monitor’ and make it take up the entire desktop. You don’t need to join them into one massive virtual monitor.
But yes I’d still like to fix the bug anyways.
so we tested this and comping everything into one big window works, however i had to set it to ‘Bounds’ … ‘Desktop’ didn’t work and only took over one screen. With this solution everything works nicely now.
Reading your last comment again i realize you probably meant to keep the two comp windows and just change the setting … since the system can handle it i thought to be on the safe side doing it with one big comp.
i’ll clean up the other patch a bit and send it through so you can have a look for the bug
thx for your help !
Sorry I did mean Bounds. You only want 1 window COMP and multiple Container COMps to bring in your different panel/outputs into the single Window COMP.
ok, then i did understand correctly, this is what we ended up doing.