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Forums -> Multiple monitors -> Multi Monitor for Movie Set
Charles   2007-06-11 01:59
Hello

I'm currently working on the film sets of Star Trek New Voyages (www.startreknewvoyages) and the set crew has been slowly replacing the lightboxes and laminate that create the bridge computer screens with real LCD's hooked to computers that run flash animation.

Currently the setup is 4 or 5 video cards in a computer each have a LCD hanging of them and then using UltraMon and Pivot Pro flash animation is moved to each of the screens that it needs to be on.

The problem with this is it's a bitch to setup. You got to turn on the machines (there's 16 monitors so it's 4 machines each with 4 video cards)take a wireless keyboard to the front of the set because the computers are behind the set, etc.

What I'm looking for is the way to control say 8 lcd monitors from one "master computer" what I envision is something like a software program that shows me a picture of 8 monitors and then I can place what ever program I want to run on one of those monitors and that is what will be displayed on it. I'd imaging a vga cable running from the video card in the computer to a box of some sort and then the 8 lcd's plugged in to that box receiving the various signals.

Does any such beast exist or is the way we are doing it the only way?

Thanks in advance!

Charles
Christian Studer   2007-06-12 09:45
If the systems are networked, you could use remote control software with multi-monitor support, for example pcAnyhwere, to connect to a system and change window arrangement etc.

Christian Studer - www.realtimesoft.com
Charles Root   2007-06-14 00:56
They're not networked, but that's no biggie we could throw them on one in about an hour using a cheap hub and setting up a spare machine as a domain controller.

I'm intrigued by the idea of PCAnywhere, I look in to more.

What I really wish for is a program that showed me like 8 little screens and when I clicked on one of those screens I could execute whatever I wanted there.

I don't think there is going to be one "boxed" solution to this, and I'm going to just need to cobble something together.

Thanks
ecarlson   2007-06-18 13:23
RAdmin 3 also supports multiple monitors, and you can try it without having to buy it first, and it is cheaper than PCAnywere in case you do end up buying it. It also has screen scaling of the remote screen(s?), but I haven't tried scaling with multiple remote monitors yet (maybe later this week).

- Eric, www.InvisibleRobot.com
thesmj   2007-06-18 18:19
UltraVNC is like PCAnywhere, only its free via GPL.
ecarlson   2007-06-21 00:38
I see that UltraVNC finally added Multi-Monitor support. I wonder if any of the other VNC versions have added multi-monitor support, and I wonder how well it works. I used to use VNC regularly back around the turn of the century, though it had its issues at the time -- good to see that it is still being actively developed.

I also see that the VNC Wikipedia entry mentions 2 versions of VNC that work more like MaxiVista, allowing you to extend your desktop onto additional computers.

Though this thread isn't really about remote control apps per se. I hope the original poster lets us know how what solution they come up with.

- Eric, www.InvisibleRobot.com
Forums -> Multiple monitors -> Multi Monitor for Movie Set

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