Some of you may have noticed that I write quite a few articles for each year. So I have an opportunity to talk to a lot of churches. In those conversations, the topic of media servers to control video content is becoming commonplace. Media servers not only let you control the video being sent to your screens; they also can be controlled from lighting consoles, which allows for very tight integration between lighting changes and video changes.
I do volunteer lighting work for Spiritual Twist Productions, a Christian youth theater group local to the Raleigh, N.C. area. We just concluded a production of the story of , re-set in 1920s-1930s America, and the director of the program wanted to try using the side screens in her auditorium as part of the scenic design for the play. This seemed like an excellent opportunity to do a review of a media server, and as we use Jands Vista for lighting control, the Arkaos Stage Server seemed like a good choice because both are distributed and supported in North America by A.C. Lighting.
Overview
The Arkaos Stage Server is basically a Windows 7 rack-mount PC with a high-end graphics card adding two additional DVI outputs, and a DMX interface built in. Our evaluation server came with Arkaos Media Master Pro software installed.
The idea of a media server is to provide almost a video editor-style layering environment. The Pro version of Media Master gives you 12 layers of video, each of which can hold any standard graphic, still image or video clip. Transparency in the images or videos is honored, allowing the layers underneath to come through. The opacity of each layer is adjustable from 1%-100%, and mixing effects like chroma and luma keying can be applied to any layer. The position of each layer is adjustable, special effects can be applied to each layer, and the color composition of each layer can be adjusted as well.
But the sweetest thing about using a media server is really its ability to integrate with lighting consoles. There are two modes in which the software can operate: theater mode, where you create your looks on the Media Master software itself and store them as presets that can be activated from the lighting console; or fixture mode, where both the master output of the Media Master system as well as each individual layer are patched into the lighting system as fixtures, and you create your looks via the lighting console. Fixture mode what we used to program our show for Spiritual Twist Productions, as I wanted maximum flexibility in controlling the media server. Since we didn’t have a DMX splitter available, I used ArtNet to interconnect the media server with the computer running the Jands Vista software.
Preparation
To begin, we needed to load our media into the Media Master library. The Media Master software allows for 256 media folders, and each folder can contain 256 pieces of media. For both folders and images, the filename must start with a three-digit number indicating the “slot” it fills, followed by an underscore and then whatever you want for the rest of the name. There is no need to rename the files. Drag and drop into the wanted folder in the interface. MediaMaster Pro will copy your content in the most efficient place on you computer.
After populating the library using normal Windows (or Mac, if you are running the Mac version) file copy functions, you tell the Media Master software to refresh the library.
You also need to set up the video displays you want to use for your media. Using the Video Mapper subsystem of the software, you select the video output devices that you want to use for the video output, and create a custom shape “surface” on them. The surfaces can also be seen as a virtual output. The video mapper of Media Master software interface works with these surfaces. not with the video displays. This lets you create multiple surfaces on each display if you want. For example, if you wanted to use your video screen sub-divided into four quadrants, instead of having to resize and crop each layer into the position you want, you can simple create four surfaces on the display using the video mapper, and assign a layer to whichever of these surfaces you want it to appear in. It’s a nice short-cut. Creating custom surfaces will allow you to map content on 3D shape such as buildings, cars, and other objects.
The arKaos media server was awesome to use for this production, THE ABILITY TO PLAY AND MANIPULATE LAYERS WAS OUTSTANDING.
Jim Kumorek
Reviewer.
The last things to do are to assign these surfaces to surface numbers (used both in the main interface as well as via DMX to dynamically assign layers to surfaces), and to set the DMX operation of the server. There are several fixture types one can choose to represent the master section of the server as well as each layer to a lighting console. If you don’t need the more advanced capabilities of the larger modes, you can save on DMX addresses by using the smaller modes. If you go with the most robust presentation of the server to the lighting system, you’ll use close to two universes to fully represent the server.
Once this setup is complete, you switch the system into full-screen mode which causes it to take over the extra video outputs and enables output to the surfaces you’ve defined. Output 0 is always set to send a layer to all the defined surfaces.
Then, on the lighting console side, you patch Arkaos Media Master fixtures for the master and as many of the layers as you want to control via DMX. Once patched, the Vista software has a function to import media thumbnails from a media server so that you can actually see a still image of all the pieces of media in the Vista software when selecting media for a layer via a lighting cue. This all may sound a little complicated, but it’s really not bad at all.
Use
To use the server, each of the 12 layers shows up as a fixture in the lighting console. Most of the attributes don’t have a one-to-one correspondence with traditional lighting console concepts; in the Vista console, most of the attributes show up as custom attributes grouped under the various moving light feature sets. To select the media for a layer, for example, there are two custom attributes under the Gobo category where you select the library folder and the media within that library. To start playback, you increase the intensity of that layer fixture above 0. Intensity controls the layer's opacity—at 100%, it’s fully opaque. Anything less than 100%, the layers below start showing through.
Pan and tilt controls the X and Y positions of the layer on the assigned surface. Other custom attributes control the X, Y and Z rotation of the layer; the red, green and blue adjustments of the layer, the volume of the audio of that layer, which surface that layer should play on, and many other features. Here’s an example of how I used it in one scene in our production of the scene starts with three narrators talking about the headlines in the current time-period of the play. For most of them, this was in the 1920s and 1930s, and those I created in Adobe Illustrator, using a stock image of a blank folded newspaper, and adding a headline, a photo, and lorem ipsum text as filler. I exported these as PNGs with a transparent background around the edges of the newspaper. What I wanted to do is have a sepia looping motion background of rays of sun coming through clouds as the backdrop. Each headline would rotate in and stack on top of the previous headline, turned slightly at an angle so the edges of the previous newspaper showed at the edges. There would be several headlines, and then I wanted to fade each headline out in sequence. And, of course, these needed to be tightly timed to the pace of the live narrators, so just creating a video clip for the entire sequence wouldn’t do. The final headlines were from 2015, so we represented those by an image of a tablet computer with a hand swiping through the headlines—again, coordinated at performance-time to the pace of the narrators.
Here’s how I programmed it. I had my layers pre-programmed in my very first cue to assign the first five odd layers to the left screen, and the first five right layers to the right screen. Layers 11 and 12 were assigned to both screens.
When the initial lights on the scene came up, I had a cue that also faded up the background videos on layers one and two. (I had two separate videos for the background that were originally one video that I cut in half down the center for the two sides.) This cue also assigned media for the other layers, zoomed in to be large, and rotated quite a bit from the orientation I would eventually want them.
When the narrators mentioned the first headline, I ran the next cue, which would fade up the first headline in layers three and four, and change the rotation to be in the end position I desired and zoomed the layer out. So, the newspaper would rotate and shrink into its desired position as the cue ran for .5 seconds. Each consecutive cue faded in the next headline similarly, with the final position rotated a little further than the previous. This way, I could adjust the timing of the fade in, rotation, and zoom via the lighting console as I programmed the show. No modifications of the media were necessary to adjust any of these things on the fly.
For the tablet headlines, friends Joe Barta and Heidi Bowman at Church Initiative in Wake Forest, N.C. used the green screen studio at their place of work to shoot some footage of Heidi’s hand reaching up and pretending to swipe across a tablet. I created a background video clip of a tablet with a background motion graphic and all the graphics I wanted on the tablet screen except the headlines. I then created an initial PNG with the first headline, and then four video clips of Heidi’s hand swiping out the previous headline and bringing in the next. The background of these video clips I set to black.
To program, the first cue faded in the background image of the tablet and the initial PNG headline image. The next cue faded up the layer with the first hand-swipe loaded, with that layer set to luma-key out the black background. It came up in zero seconds, and was set to play the clip and then freeze-frame on the final frame. The previous headline on the lower layer was set to drop to 0% opacity a fraction of a second after the new layer started running. Each subsequent cue did a similar thing for the next hand-swipe. This way, I could time the hand-swipes perfectly with the live action. When the narrator started mentioning the next headline, I’d run the cue, and the hand would come up and swipe in the next headline, and freeze-frame with just the headline until the next cue ran. This worked well and looked amazing, and we received lots of exclamations from the audience. [Editor's note: A clip of this being performed at dress rehearsal showing the media server control screen, the Jands Vista screen, and the stage can be viewed here .
For another scene, we have video clips of the inside of a train boxcar (created in Photoshop by Joe Barta) with the doors open, showing the passing countryside out the doors. During rehearsal, I realized it would be even more effective if the car was gently rocking up and down a little bit. Instead of having to re-edit the clips, I simply added a pan/tilt effect from the lighting console (like what you’d apply to a moving light fixture to have it do ballyhoos) to the layers, and edited the effect to only apply to tilt, and with a very small amplitude and slow frequency. This added a beautiful, gentle rocking effect, and required no editing of the clips to get it. Sweet!
Experience
The Arkaos media server was awesome to use for this production, and it added a lot in production quality. The ability to play and manipulate layers of video in real time, tightly sync'd to lighting, is outstanding. However, it wasn’t without a few hiccups.
I had the server hang on me a couple of times. In consulting with A.C. Lighting support, we learned that the Windows 7 Aero effects needed to be disabled, which was not on this server. Aero effect in Windows 7 has no issue of compatibility with Media Master Pro. By disabling Aero effect we dedicated all the performance of the computer to Media Master. We didn’t have a problem with the Media Server software hanging after we addressed this.
(I also found a bug in the software. The train clips mentioned previously started out with showing a driveway leading to a house through the doors of the boxcar, which I wanted to skip over. I set the layer start point to be in about 10% from the start of the clip. However, instead, the clip started that far in from the end of the clip, which was not at all what we wanted. Arkaos has been notified of the bug.)
The "bug" mentioned before is a minor bug. The dwx trigger of that command made the loop start jump. However it is possible to tune the loop start directly in the interface. Our development is working on it. I’d not hesitate in using the Arkaos system again, and if you already have a powerful enough computer to run it on, you don’t need to buy the server—you can just buy the Media Master software and run it from your computer.
If you want to try it out, fully functioning demo versions can be downloaded from the Arkaos website. If there’s no valid license or dongle installed, it’ll just fade the Arkaos logo in and out over the outputs a few times a minute. And as it can be controlled via ArtNet, it’s easy to play with at home.
The Arkaos Media Master Pro Stage Server with two HD Outputs has a list price of $9,995.00. The Arkaos MediaMaster PRO Software with video and LED mapper lists for $2,100.00.
