Hello all,
We have a live event coming up and I’m really interested in som of the programming features of Touch designer. However, I was wondering how easy it is to use strictly as a media player.
So say for each song of an even I would want to crossfade several pre rendered clips interactively and blend them in real time. Like how many HD video strams can you combine at once. Can this software do that?
Thanks!
This is definitely something that Touch can do. The number of streams you can play is entirely dependent on your system. Ideally you’ll want one CPU core per movie playing. Also you will want one or multiple SSD drives to hold your content, as playing multiple movies off an HDD will result in poor performance.
Once you have the videos playing, the amount of processing you can do with them with TOPs is dependent on your GPU. Get powerful one and you’ll be able to do lots of effects. Cross-fades are simple.
What kind of resolution are you trying to play? What video codec to you plan to use?
We’ll be driving probably 2-3 projectors at 1080p.
And the plan would be to combine 1 or 2 prerendered elements along with some realtime graphics driven by an audio source.
As far as video codec, I’m all ears. Typically we’re mac based and use prores, but that’s not for Windows obviously. What codecs to you recommend? Ideally it would support alpha as well.
A couple other questions are:
_what is the latency for processing audio and outputing graphics driven by the audio.
_if you want to control a few parameters such as video source opacity and size, is a MIDI controller surface the way to go?
Thanks for the help!
Since you need alpha animation codec is an option, but you’ll want 1 dedicated drive per movie to ensure you have the needed bandwidth. If you are sure you files compress well (arn’t too busy or noise) then you can probably get away with 2 movies per drive. What kind of hard drive setup to you use to stream ProRes files in this kind of setup?
Another option to deal with alpha is to have a movie that is double height with the bottom half a monochrome image that is the alpha. The Movie In TOP has an option to take a movie that is double high and combine the RGB from the top with the monochrome color in the bottom into the alpha channel.
If you have the budget for the Pro version, Cineform is a good option also. It compresses well and the quality is outstanding.
The latency for the Audio processing is entirely dependent on what you are doing (filter widths, the CHOPs you are using)
To control parameters from an external device there are quite a few options. MIDI is a good one. Another option is any type of device that sends OSC channels, such as an iOS device with the TouchOSC app.