A few weeks ago I stopped by the Production Office to check out a system they were using to test the video projections for The Mad 7. The play uses pre-recorded video (and supertitles) juxtaposed with live acting, and the video is played on three different surfaces. All told, this requires four video projectors all coordinating their projections from one source. In order to make this possible, the Production Staff coordinated with our IT staff to rent some new technology. I got a chance to take a sneak peak of the set-up and snap a few photos, and I’ve finally had a moment to put them up online. The five monitors you see in the picture were being used to test the five different outputs that the system will have to generate (one for the operator’s screen, three for full motion video, and the fourth for supertitles). In the actual performance space, there will be only one screen, and the other four monitors will be replaced with video projectors.

Rich Tepper, who is our IT super-hero, explained it all to me. The projections are run from an Apple Mac Pro, which we rented specifically for The Mad 7. It has dual Quad-core processors at 2.66ghz and 4gb of RAM. It also has three Dual head PCI-E video cards (with 256mb of video RAM each) installed. That gives us the possibility of having six total outputs. With one of those reserved for the operator’s screen, there are actually five possible presentation outputs, and we are using four of those (three for the video, the fourth for supertitles).To coordinate all this, we use a piece of software called Qlab that is produced by a company called Figure53. It is a free download for the Mac OS (so give it a try at home) that runs playback of audio, video and MIDI. It sort of works like SFX (which I discussed in a previous blog post), except it is a heck of a lot cheaper and is capable of controlling video as well as sound (and integrating the two into the same media timeline).

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre

This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 8:30 am and is filed under Behind the Scenes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.