Serial Digital

Encore can accept a range of sources to generate backgrounds; however the obvious choice due to quality and flexibility is an unscaled DVI background. The down side to this is that your content needs to be produced in order to provide a unique DVI feed to each Encore VP with the appropriate part of the image for each section of the blend.

Barco makes this process a little easier with the options in its ‘Widescreen’ configuration menu (Output Setup). When using a triple-head display card or device, such as the Matrox TripleHead2Go, choose the background format as ‘Edge-butted’, and choose to centre the background content – while you’re there, ensure Data Doubling is ‘Enabled’ to make sure that the PIP content matches across the blend regions.

The Matrox TripleHead2Go makes a suitable unscaled DVI background source for Encore with a couple of considerations:
1. The TripleHead2Go is designed primarily for extending the desktop of a computer across multiple monitors, and as such, isn’t best suited to running heavy graphics and video – you will find that the stress that the unit places on your display computer’s graphics card will make it near impossible to display fluid transitions in Keynote or PowerPoint, or play back full resolution video.

2. When designing content, ensure you leave adequate space to the left and right of your content to compensate for the blend overlap (i.e. if you have 2x 1920×1080 projectors on a 3.333:1 screen, your total pixel space will not be 3840×1080, but rather 3600×1080). In PowerPoint or Keynote this is easy – just choose a slide format in 3.333:1 ratio (or a resolution of 3600×1080 in Keynote) and when you run the presentation, both PowerPoint and Keynote will automatically pillarbox the left and right of the output to compensate.

3. The Matrox TripleHead2Go does not yet support the common projection resolution of SXGA+ (1400×1050) out of the box. While it may be possible to ‘hack’ the TripleHead2Go device to support this resolution using a tool like PowerStrip, I’ve never tried it, and wouldn’t suggest that it’s worth relying on (if anyone has achieved this please feel free to comment!).

4. There are a maximum of 3 outputs using this device – and only 2 outputs if you’re using a high resolution such as 1920×1080 – so keep this in mind if you have larger edge-blending requirements. For true scalability, you would be better off using a system like AVStumpfl Wings or Dataton Watchout, both systems would run video and transitions a lot more fluidly, and would provide a much greater capacity to scale.

Matrox TripleHead2Go product page