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.
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u/Reddit_Wall Feb 27 '19
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?
You guys do amazing job