OT - ish - Video capture / editing

[Adrian Brentnall]

HI folks Continuing my thoughts about the Raspberry PI / video-wall installation.... - which will be kind of d-i-y, as I'll be doing it myself - and I know that there a people here with wide experience on the computer side...

I'm looking to replace the current over-complicated installation (7 x win xp PCs plus a Win NT server) with something more like a video-wall, run by Raspberry Pi's. The video-wall bit is relatively straightforward - a 'master' RPi plays a video out to a network of 'slaves' - who each display their own segment of the video on their own screen.

I originally understood that the source of the current display was an actual video - I found out a few days ago that the current system has been configured to create a 3-screens-wide display from a bunch of stills that the client supplied, plus some unspecified 'magik'.

So - it occurred to me that, if I could actually capture the current video from each screen / pc, and then 'stitch' them together in some kind of video editor, I'd then end up with a 'widescreen' video file that the RPi system could play out onto the same screens.

I've no experience of these matters - just wondered if anybody here does know about them, and could offer some pointers as to video capture s/w to run on the XP's and video editing software that could combine the 6 individual videos into a file that contains the same screens in a 3-wide by 2-high format.

Thanks, Adrian

[spuorgelgoog]

If you have access to the stills, I would recreate the presentation in Open office/LibreOffice Impress, or Screenmonkey, as a single-screen video, and then let piwall handle the screen-splitting. That provides flexibility if t he number of screens changes later.

Owain

[Adrian Brentnall]

Thanks for the reply - but it's not that simple. Currently, the system simulates the sailing of a ship around a piece of coast... there were (apparently) only a few stills, but there's 10 - 15 minutes of video generated - so there's been 'something clever' done with them. Three big plasma screens show the view out of the windows, three smaller lcd screens show navigation & other engineering info.

The existing system is massive overkill for what's actually needed ( as it's a full-featured, professional, interactive, expensive, simulation system - but it's being run at the moment in 'kiosk' mode 'cos otherwise the little kiddies delight in steering the ship onto the rocks, and then manual intervention is needed to restart the system, reset the alarms etc. )

Thanks Adrian

[spuorgelgoog]

How realistic does the video and instrumentation have to be in your replacement display?

Owain

[Adrian Brentnall]

Yes - way too cool/kewl for the average kiddie.... The physical install was done for 'grown-ups' - so there's public access to things like the setup buttons on the lcd monitors - which is probably why one of them is currently set up in Finnish, and set to the wrong sync/vertical/horizontal position! (I wouldn't mind, but they've broken the pushbuttons as well - so we'll have to transplant a working set of pushbuttons from another monitor on to it to untangle it. Grrr!)

Well - at least as realistic as it currently is - which isn't all that bad.... - hence the idea of 'cloning' the signals that are currently being sent to the monitors in real-time (as video files), and arranging a system to re-play those video feeds, synchronised, but without the massive overhead of the 8 x pc's (which must be at least ten years old) and are starting to suffer from disk-rot.

Perhaps in an ideal world you'd shoot some real (wide-screen) video for the 'view out of the windows' - but then you'd still need to fake up the instrumentation for the other screens and keep that in-step with the video....

Displays are currently some 42" Fujitsu plasma monitors which are not terribly hi-res, so, at the moment, HD video would be kinda wasted on them. Future developments might include replacing these screens with modern kit - but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Adrian