Playing real movies on pixel matrix wall

[brichi]

hey guys, I'm wondering if this is even possible, I have 2, 7 foot wide by 5 feet high windows on my house, I wanted to do pixel strips to build a matrix wall approximately 18 strips wide by 14 high give a take a strip or 2. I tried to replicate this in PE which looked great with scrolling text and patterns but I can't seem to get movies to play clear. What size are people doing if they wanted to literally use this like a tv to play a Christmas movie on? even quick clips of Rudolph, frosty, Santa waving, etc....

I tried to open an avi of a video I have from my phone into PE and nothing really shows up, u can see there is stuff going on but u can't see the actually full size of the video 

Edited January 27, 2017 by brichi

[dibblejr]

I am also working on a similar situation. The closer the pixels the better the quality, just like your TV. So perhaps you have your pixel spacing to far apart. Just a guess.

Im going to start building a matrix tomorrow to have in my garage for testing and learning purposes.

Edited January 27, 2017 by dibblejr

[k6ccc]

The problem is that the resolution is truly horrible for video.  For comparison, an old analog TV is 525 horizontal lines (of which you see about 475 lines).  Your computer monitor is likely far more than that (mine that I'm looking at right now is 1080 high by 1920 wide - a little over two million pixels).  Your description of the dimensions of your matrix is rather ambiguous.  Please describe it in pixels, not strips (or at least something like 40 strips of 50 pixels per strip with 60 pixel per meter spacing on each strip).  However, I can say with a substantial certainty that it is not in the hundreds of thousands of pixels.  Even CGA (Color Graphics Adapter which came out in 1981) was 200 x 640 in it's highest possible resolution looked fairly bad (and truly dismal in it's lowest resolution of 160 x 200 (which is 32,000 pixels)).

 

[BMurray]

5 hours ago, dibblejr said:

I am also working on a similar situation. The closer the pixels the better the quality, just like your TV. So perhaps you have your pixel spacing to far apart. Just a guess.

Im going to start building a matrix tomorrow to have in my garage for testing and learning purposes.

Me too.  I've got 2000 pixels from Ray and a matrix board from Holiday Sequences which holds 1,200 pixels and the distance between pixels is 1.9" in any direction.  So really not movie quality of course but with simple GIFs and picture animations it looks very nice.  And also the viewing distance helps too so the more pixels you have the closer the viewing distance and the tighter the matrix with a 1" pixel to pixel distance.    The less pixels you have the further viewing distance you'll need to have so the picture or animations don't look so "pixelated"  Can't wait to get it up and running.  Just got in my controllers from HC.  So its gonna be a fun weekend

[brichi]

thanks guys!

BMurray, can you post pics or video when you're done this weekend? I may look into the same, i just looked on HS at the pixel board, its not bad for the price and RayWu 1200 pixels to fill the board is like $400, not bad at all

[Little_b]

The more compact your pixels are to each other to better the quality will be.  I'm not sure how far away your matrix will be from the viewing area as this is also something to take into consideration.  2" on center is best if viewing is less than 100-150 feet.  3" on center for about 150' or more.  Here is a clip of a video I used this year.  Mine are 3" apart and viewing is about 120' away or so. (The glitch rows were caused by a bad pixel I fixed after I took the video).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc2h_HR0aL0

When I used photos in other songs, I used the Paint.net program to touch them up or draw them myself.  I made the canvass the same size as my pixel matrix which meant what pixel was on in the photo was on on the matrix.

You said when you open your video in PE you can see stuff going on but not the whole thing, did you try clicking on the scale image tab?  If you are having trouble viewing your video in PE, you may need to convert it a little.  There is a program Matt from LOR talks about called Virtualdub All in One that works really well for this.  I use it and it works great for me.  Read this thread-

http://forums.lightorama.com/index.php?/topic/39680-effect-generater/#comment-364770

http://forums.lightorama.com/index.php?/topic/41029-movie-effect-problem/#comment-379478

 

Edited January 27, 2017 by Little_b
Added more info

[brichi]

great video, looks great on the roof.

mine will be probably 50 feet away from street to top window of house

probably 1.5 inch apart may work or the 1.9" in the HS matrix kit

I saw those other links last night, i am scaling and used VDub to convert to the uncompressed avi, image may just need more pixels

[ebrown1972]

I would highly recommend making your matrix out of this http://m.homedepot.com/p/Tenax-3-ft-x-15-ft-Plastic-Black-Hardware-Net-751397/100384025?MERCH=REC-_-mobileweb_pip_rr-6-_-100384028-_-100384025-_-N

If you use this you can make your pixel matrix whatever spacing you want. Bullet pixels fit in the squares perfectly. Just make a PVC frame or conduit frame for it.