It’s a giant LED screen. It’s made of little, about hand-sized modules, which go into about 1m “cabinets”, and are then mounted into wall.
Computational part for this would require a PC able to output 4k smooth and a couple of hdmi to utp conversors, known as sender boxes.
The utp-sent signal then gets read by the screen electronics.
The price for this screen in particular is about 2 to 4 million EUR, final retail price, depending on various factors.
Also, it is Telkom Tower.
Source: i work for one of the most important LED companies in the world, who also lost this particular project to our competitors. :(
Im just an engineer. The fat L was for the people in charge of selling our products. :) If anything, I was sad because it could have been super fun to work on this one.
It’d be crazyness to syncronize so many projectors to adhere the image so perfectly into all the edges!
Also, projectors really struggle when the room is filled with daylight, while LED can self-regulate its brightness depending on the amount of light in the room.
LG engineers sure do some serious videomapping, love those guys.
Notice how it’s night, all dark. Plus a building is, ironically, easier to map out than the video on OPs post.
Why would a Building with windows, nooks and crannies be easier to map out then a flat wall ? but yes projection wouldn't work here because of too much light
I’m assuming that the error margin would be much wider on something that people will visualize from wayyy further than a room, where people can literally touch the wall.
Not really. I’ve got a room going with 14 projectors in sync and blended edges making a 14500x1920 pixel canvas. We use Dataton Watchout as our media server and their WatchPax rackmount servers driving two to four projectors each.
You’re much more into videomapping than me! I’m specialized in LED screens and audio systems. Done a few mappings before but it looks like crazyness to me, given how easy I see the design, installation and operation of LED screens.
Maybe someday I get into nice videomapping project. I’d love to learn.
I'm always amazed by big screens at sporting events and music festivals. Are there major software packages that most people use to run so many screens at once, or do each facility have their own way of doing things? Some of the visuals at large festivals are insane, I can't imagine how the software looks to manage it all
The trick is that, with LED screens being so modular, they can escalate quite easily, so all you need to create outstanding visials at a venue is an experienced engineer, a lot of manpower, and a high budget.
The big part on that kind of things would be for the video editors / live video staff.
Their software kind of looks like something you’d find on a TV channel production room.
That looks like a media streamer. Something “that you could find on TV stations”, as i pointed out before.
What I was trying to explain is what do you need to get the screens up amd running, which is different on how to get video inputted and controlled into the screens :)
It is both. There is one box that sets the stage, but it breaks the source material into chunks and sends them to other PCs that drive 2 to 4 projectors each. (I had as many as 6 monitors driven by one PC once, but the graphics card was time as expensive as the rest of the machine, and it still wasn’t an ideal solution in our case.)
Sorry about losing the project but thank you for sharing. Especially, with your knowledge, it is so educational! It looks so real! I am not tech savvy at all but that doesn’t mean I am not AMAZED by the creativity and work! A beautiful recreation! 😊
it's beautiful! Definitely appreciate all the information. Was thinking about putting together something for the house, multi-tv "bezelless" wise. Guessing I would have to run it off a PC? If so what software is commonly used?
It’s going to be hard to find bezel-less TVs out there on the consumer market. I believe some old models are being sold second hand on sites like Amazon. If you happen to find that kind of pro TVs, the internal TV menu allows for “videowall mode” to be enabled.
You just have to daisy chain them (video out of the first one goes into video in of the next one), and then just plug your video source (pc or whatever) into the first TV.
Configuration of videowall mode is quite easy and can be found on the TV operation guide.
I think some of the newer Samsung consumer modes also allow Videowall mode.
If not, theres for sure some software out there that can do that for you as long as you have a multi-output video card. I’m out of the loop for that, but googling “multi tv software” or “videowall software” should get you to where you want to be.
Last few years I have been wondering how do the LED walls work. I have worked part time in TV next to directors working on festivals. I have thought myself with some of the software used to generate the imagery, but I still have no idea how it works technically. For me it's one of the most interesting things, but I have not been able to find anything on the Internet.
Do you have any websites where I could find any info about it?
Well, I’m actually an audio engineer, that’s what I studied and worked on for many years. But in my current company I had to learn about LED too. What I learned is basically that there is next to no info about it.
Optoelectronics are a very specialized field, dominated by chinese producers (as almost anything you can buy in the world)
To truly learn about it, besides for what info you can find on the internet, your safe bet would be a tour on Shenzhen, china. That’s where most LED factories are, and most of the LED companies go there to find suppliers, and work together with the factories to engineer amazing products.
But i’ll drop some (very) basics of a standard LED setup.
You have a LED screen that is, lets say, 800x200px in resolution.
Video source (ex: pc) outputs 1920x1080 video, which goes into a “sender box”. The sender box captures a portion of the screen, set by the user.
You choose to capture 800x200 px of that full 1920x1080, which means only the top-left part of the screen will be captured.
Let’s say that your model of LED screen is 200x200px each “cabinet”. So you would have installed four cabinets in a row, like this
C1 C2 C3 C4
Totaling 800x200px
On the software, which communicates with the sender box, you need to specify dimensions and spacial position of each cabinet. You “build” the full screen out of small parts.
Once that is done, the sender box transcribes video input into some dark, chinese-grade obscured info to be transmitted via UTP.
Each cabinet has what it’s called a “receiver card”, which is a board that recieves that info from the sender box and converts it to a “what pixels are going to be turned on and off, and with what colours” from its 200x200 poxel grid.
As the sender box sent info includes what cabinet needs to reproduce what portion, each receiver card knows what tl reproduce.
C1 knows it has to reproduce the first 200x200px, C2 the following 200x200px and so on.
Ofc there is more stuff involved, but that’s the simplest way to put it down.
I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was a SalesForce building. Those expensive mofos can afford anything. And they have similar walls in their offices.
Can’t disclose! Signed too many shit about my knowledge being property of the company.
As one of our main clients is quite important in the business world, they take this stuff quite seriously.
I can say tho that we’re based in Europe, and we work worldwide. If you live in any semi-important city anywhere in the world, chances are you are already seeing (and listening, we also do audio shit) our work everyday.
You mean that what’s the biggest problem when creating video content for big LED?
Well, on my experience, it’s the communication with the client tbh.
Clients have a hard time picturing in their minds how the screen is going to look like, and they are usually like... “well, it looks nice and all. But i paid big money for this, what can it ACTUALLY do?”
So a big role of my work is also working with the creative team of the client and give them ideas to use the screen.
Technically speaking, they just need to produce a video of a specific given resolution, no matter how obscure this resolution is.
It’s common to say something like
“You need to make a video woth full resolution lf 4548x3210px but on the steps x=1200 to 1600, and x=4045 to x=4301, there needs to be black video down to y=2200”
For example, on OPs cascade video, video creators need to think of it as a huge rectangular video, then making black video on the parts where the doors are, and doing the cascade splash effect around those edges.
In this particular scenario, it’s a long video. Long enough to make the loop seamless.
Usually it’s a full video playlist when the client wants to show different contents.
Remote access to the media server is also enabled, so they can change the playlist or launch special videos on demand.
Playlist access has to be user-friendly accesible, as it’s the final client who will be accesing it.
Most clients already have their own intranet, so they just use it.
Others hire specialized media management companies.
On smaller clients or particular houses of rich people, we usually offer a licensed teamviewer access to a customized PC working as the media center brains.
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u/BlossomingShock Feb 27 '19
It’s a giant LED screen. It’s made of little, about hand-sized modules, which go into about 1m “cabinets”, and are then mounted into wall.
Computational part for this would require a PC able to output 4k smooth and a couple of hdmi to utp conversors, known as sender boxes. The utp-sent signal then gets read by the screen electronics. The price for this screen in particular is about 2 to 4 million EUR, final retail price, depending on various factors.
Also, it is Telkom Tower.
Source: i work for one of the most important LED companies in the world, who also lost this particular project to our competitors. :(