Using TouchDesigner in an exhibition without computer

Hi,

I am pretty new to using Touchdesigner and also new to projection mapper. So sorry if this question is dumb.

I made a video that should be projected to two perpendicular walls. I am mapping everything on Touchdesigner so that edges of the walls would blink, they would play the videos I do in Adobe AE etc. It all works pretty nice and convincing as I play stuff from my computer.

Now, once it comes down to installing this video as an installation and leaving that there for a month or so, of course, I do not want to have my laptop there sitting the whole month.

One solution I came up was to do everything and then install with a basic media player and have it loop with a VLC media player. This conceptually works but then I get ‘black light’ of the projector and it does not look good. (btw. I don’t understand what projection mapping programs do so that I don’t see this black light anyhow and a brief explanation is really appreciated)

In my further research, I found this minimad from MadMapper, looks ok but I was wondering if there are alternative solutions or other working methods with touchdesigner that I can use. I did not completely understand what touchplayer would do for me, would that be a solution??

I would appreciate any help :slight_smile:
Thanks

Omer

Hi Omer,

All projectors have the black light. Sometimes you can avoid that being really bad by changing the projectors picture mode from “bright” to something else like “high contrast”. Try flicking through the modes to see what works best for you. You’ll probably lose overall brightness but your black level wont be so bad. Another way to avoid this is to use the old school trick of making a mask on the projector lens (with something non-flammable or meltable if your projector is 20k lumens or so) to feather off the edge.

It’s also worth mentioning sometimes black isn’t black when playing h.264 files through certain media players. You’ll especially notice this in Quicktime for windows.

Hi Ennui,

Thanks for your answer. So according to this, is it possible that I can play my video after exporting from TouchDesigner in whatever I want and it will be the same as playing it directly from the TouchDesigner?

If so, then I can just deal with a regular media player and that would work?

Thanks for your reply

yes, if you don’t need any realtime interactivity during show, you can render your already mapped videocontent (with all eventual extra brightness / contrast /gamma settings already applied to give the best results on your projectors) from TD to a moviefile, and you can play this moviefile back on any mediaplayer.
The end-result will be the same - as long as the projectors haven’t moved and you choose a videocodec&compression without any visible artifacts.

hi!

Thank you for your reply! It is really helpful.