Débrief du gig live projection chez Leswar

Design

Loop Design

Research and process

Challenges and wins

Technical challenges

• Only TOPs, no GPU
• Connect a cam and stream video.
• Reliable during the whole night
• Cables, length is always an issue
• Sound input ?

Unknowns

• Will the loop crash ? What then ?
• Will the cam keep up the whole night ?

Unexpected challenges and wins

• ✨ Used a friend’s M3 mac $\to$ a lot of input/output and enhanced visual power
• ✨ A friend’s dad lended a Canon EOS R6 mk II, which was really plug and play by USB C.
• ✨ Having a chill zone next to the stage for a safe cam / PC setup. Could’ve been a challenge with the cables
• ✨ AUX send to the Focusrite was easy
• 👹 Obligation to keep an eye on the cam battery level and switch when it dies (no power from USB C)
• 👹 Smoke and lights influencing on the visuals ofc
• 👹 Because of the cable length the control room was really not confortable

Key learnings and thoughts

Overall

Some misc general things :

• setup on event day always takes a bit longer than expected, having a solid vision and todo-list could be super useful.
• trust that it’ll work, or at least some version of it
• don’t leave things unknown, the cam setup could’ve been a main problem, some guy “checked” the streaming via usb, but didn’t manage, we all thought we would need to buy a mini hdmi the next day. Turns out there was an option to tick in the params, one research away from a very easy solution.
• Keep track of the hours, for self, and for reference for future projects.

Fragile effect

The thermal colors effect was super hard to dial in, it was super dependant on the light, colors and contrast of the video in. There was also a pretty fragile feedback loop. I should’ve better selected the ranges of the parameters and maybe experimented more during the setup phase. I knew the effect was more fragile and it was the one I mastered the less. So it was stressful to play with it during the event without breaking the effect catastrophically. In short, keep the setup dials to a minimum : a level or monochrome TOP, a gain button for the sound. ie : have a reference for the “perfect” input and try to get close to it

Perform mode

I know I could’ve made a better perform mode setup. Keep only a few controls instead of the whole network in a second window.
The technique of duplicating the pane and setting the main window to perform mode was maybe not the most robust one, but I still needed to touch the pc a lot to fine tune the visuals during the event so the setup was very useful this time. I know this was caused by lack of time the last week, not plug and play enough for my taste, still had to do a lot during setup the previous day.

Remote access

Having a webserver and being able to change some parameters on a phone would’ve been nice. Another soluce would’ve been rustdesk, and just acess the whole pc, but need of a second PC, less for on the go during the night, more for the setup phase.

Controls

The PS4 controls where used more like a macro controls panel. A useful thing would’ve been to have two pages, one for when it’s sitting next to the PC, one for when dialing in the effects in the room. Here I think I lost some usability by wanting to put everything in a do-it-all mapping.