05Apr

Synchronizing Video on Multiple PCs Using Adobe Director

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jumper20085726_fWhen the 20th Century Fox picture “Jumper” staring Hayden Christensen was being released on DVD, the launch event was scheduled to take place at the Appenzeller Visualization Laboratory in our very own Dayton Ohio. We were tasked through our partner, daytaOhio, to come up with a compilation of video clips that could be played using their virtual reality CAVE environment.

With footage from 20th Century Fox we decided to create a “moving” fight sequence. The video would jump from wall to wall, depending on the direction the characters were taking. For example, in one instance the characters are falling off of a building so the video would jump down to the floor of the visualization CAVE during the fall. Each wall of the CAVE uses its own projector controlled by a separate PC.

We took the original footage and broke it down into 4 different clips: left wall, center wall, right wall, and floor. Each clip either displayed active video, or black (when not in use). Now for the tricky part: Create a method where the video clips start at the exact same time at the press of a button and run in perfect sync.

We knew that utilizing the Director MUS (Multi-User Server) Xtra would be the easiest solution, but documentation and tutorials were scarce. Reaching out to the Adobe Director community we were able to acquire some scripts that were a great starting point. In a few hours we had a couple of PCs in our office setup as clients and one PC set as the server. When the button was pressed, the client PCs ran their own specific windows executable that had been built by Charles Moser, TDH Director of Interactive Services, using Director.

When syncing video, all the machines must be running the same hardware and same software versions. In the CAVE environment, this is the case. Another pitfall we had to address was video encoding. Which video compression method should we use? Initially we went with DivX, but found the startup times varied by machine, even though the hardware and software were identical. We tried several other solutions, but found that a simple MPEG I compression worked flawlessly.

To complete this project we used the following:
Adobe Director 11
Adobe Director Multi-User Xtra Multiusr.x32
Tabuleiro MPEG Xtra

Special Thanks to the Director Community for guidance, especially David Craddock, Dean Utian and the wonderful folks at Tabuleiro Xtras.

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Written by Mark Coyne

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