What do you do when you have a massive LED video wall, 6 projectors, and nothing to control them with?
We cry a bit, then start with the cables. 1 HDMI & 6 SDI. I personally don’t own a computer with all those outputs, but can we make it work? You already know the answer.
My M1 Max laptop has 1 HDMI port & 3 Thunderbolt USB C ports. The CPU has a limit of 4 external displays, but that doesn’t apply to displays connected via Displaylink.
So to make this work we can use 2x USB C -> HDMI adapters, a USB C hub with HDMI out, and a DisplayLink laptop dock. 6x Blackmagic HDMI to SDI Micro Converter address the SDI cabling. All connected it looks like:
- HDMI Port (1)
- USB C -> HDMI Adapter (2) -> SDI Converter
- USB C -> HDMI Adapter (3) -> SDI Converter
- Generic USB C Hub with HDMI Port
- HDMI Port (4) -> SDI Converter
- USB 3.0 Type A Dell D3100 Dock
- HDMI Port (5) -> SDI Converter
- HDMI Port (6) -> SDI Converter
- DisplayPort Port -> HDMI Adapter (7) -> SDI Converter
- Internal laptop screen for controlling the software (8)
That poor poor 7th screen: USB C Hub -> Displaylink Dock -> DisplayPort output -> HDMI Adapter -> SDI Converter, wow that’s gross. It did work though!
Software time, how do we drive this? I rented QLab for 48 hours. Setting up 3 separate targets let me control each section separately: the LED wall, the 5 side by side projectors as one ultra wide target, and the solo projector on the side.
I animated the logos in Premiere and overlaid them on some footage matching the theme and called it a day. QLab is okay for triggering existing clips as opposed to mixing things live with Resolume. Beats launching 7 instances of VLC.
Also, I love QLab’s rent to own licensing model.