There are three vital components to doing theatrical projections: creating the videos, rendering the videos and building the show system. Creating the videos is usually the easy and fun part. Rendering is a time-consuming inevitability. Building the system is almost always painful.
Two shows ago I ran Gaul's video using QLab. The unreliability and overall kludginess of that software left me looking for another solution so for Pugilist we went with Quicktime movies. It worked great. We just had one quicktime movie on screen which we paused and played using the computer keyboard. We accomplished fades using a projector dowser constructed by a stage hand. Operated remotely by a string, the dowser was a piece of wood that slid up and down to cover the projector lens. Simple, yet effective. (The pic above shows a fancy automatic dowser sitting on the projector).
Hardware dowsing is actually very important for theater. First, it allows for true "blackout." In theater the stage goes black for transitions, like a fade in film. If your projector or monitors are on, they will visibly light the stage since video black is projected black, not true black. Second, a dowser provides a safety net. If the computer crashes or otherwise screws up, a dowser lets you turn off the screen quickly and reliably. Without a dowser or curtain, you're working without a net. Third, a dowser makes it easy to fade out cues. Let's say you're playing a video and it goes longer than the scene. You just dowse the video and it appears to fade out gracefully. This means you don't have to program any fades into the video and yet, you can time the fades perfectly. When you're projecting, always fight for a hardware dowser.
Since this system worked so well I thought I'd try it again for Jasmine and Prodigal. But then the problems started. First, KCC has a terrific high output projector that they use for showing films. But it's really noisy and made it difficult to hear the actors. So that was out. After roaming around KCC we found two large screen monitors. We talked to the the stage designer about working those into the set as a focal point.
So here's the problem. How do you dowse two on screen monitors? We talked for a while about putting up a black curtain that would reveal and hide the TVs. But unlike the makeshift dowser built for Pugilist, this one would have to look good as part of the set. So I decided to bake the fades into the video and go without the dowser. Working without a net.
Version one of our system was supposed to work like this. Each of the monitors was hardwired to an old XP computer mounted directly below on a stand. We planned on extending the keyboards using USB cables so we could operate the computers off stage. Problem: the computers were so old that they had old keyboard-type ports, not USB ports. Our tech said it's hard to find extensions for those.
Version two. We borrowed two old XP laptops from KCC and ran long VGA cables to the monitors. The laptops had player software called GOMplayer that worked well enough to show the mp4 videos full screen and at full frame rate. Problems: First, we found that GOMplayer doesn't play audio from mp4s which was important for one video that had sync sound. Second, even the tech couldn't get XP in a show-ready state. One of the problems of using computers is that messages are always popping up on screen. When getting a computer ready for a show it's important to turn off screen savers, software updaters and disable power-saving settings that allow the disk drive to sleep [also turn off Expose settings & the annoying Adobe Updater]. But during one rehearsal, we had a message pop up on screen. That's XP.... Finally, and perhaps the last straw, the movie player technique wasn't working. Without hardware dowsing, it was impossible to get the videos timed correctly. The videos would go too short or they would go way way too long and there was no way to fade them out. Rehearsals were a pain because it was so difficult to reset the videos to the correct cue. Clearly, the system wasn't working.
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