Thread: Sync video with Props??? Arrrrgh!!

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Hi guys. Any help here would be great. I'm already planning my Halloween spectacular for next year. It will be more of a show than a display: a Pirate theme with a battle between a fort and a ship, a talking parrot etc.

The thing is, I want the show to be completely automated. I have VSA to run my servos and sound. I am going to buy a Chauvet DMX unit to control my pneumatics etc. But I also want to use a video projector to shoot images onto a screen.

In the battle between the ship and the fort, the fort will be a prop with pneumatic cannons, but the ship will be a video projection.

HOW IN THE WORLD am I going to sync the video up to the show. VSA has an audio track but there is not video channel. That's too bad because it would greatly simplify the sync problem.

Anyone have any tech experience with this?

Thanks.

Geoff

Not sure if you've seen this thread. But, there are some nuggets of info in there that might help. I know it's a long thread. Just skip all the complaining back and forthe nonsense. It's an excellent thread if you ignore that stuff.

Asylum Door Prop

Not a project for the feint of heart.
The (very) short instruction set is to use one of the VSA control channels as your video controller.
You will have to take the output of VSA channel and convert it to a signal that your VCR/DVD player can understand - RS 232 or IR usually.
This way your video signals are triggered in sync with your soundtrack.

If the cannons are the only things that need to be synced with the video, then what Hirez00 is working on in that Asylum Door thread is exactly what you need. Rather than syncing the video to the other actions, you'll be syncing the other actions to the video.

The Asylum Door thread is brilliant.
Long, yes.
But wade through it and there are some very creative solutions to the video/audio/animation sync issue.
I guess it will boil down to the Quick-Easy-or-Cheap- Pick-Two scenerio as to how you want to acheive the result you want.

Thanks you guys. I'll read the thread and hopefully get some ideas.