Were talking serious development time here but it may well be worth it:
Idea 1> Tying together the 3 card plus discussion and the guitar chords discussion featured in the Zionworx wishlist forum - we have a viable, useful and practical idea here. Imagine for a moment that screen 1 is the operator, screen 2 is the congregation with words, screen three is the worship team with words and guitar tab. Limited application - possibly. One could argue that worship leaders should learn their music properly, after all God didn't cut any corners when creating the universe so why should we when rehearsing our worship. But perhaps here lies the key. Worship, Rehearse. Although scriptural were encouraged to have ordered worship to avoid chaos, live worship unlike any other musical performance medium has the outside effect of the spirit and as such the set can go out of the window and the need for an appropriate back-catalogue track may arise. This is where this function would prove invaluable, in a similar way in which digital words liberated worship leaders to attack the back catalogue of songs.
Idea 2> Many modern graphics cards have video in as well as out. This is displayed in the last stage of the card process, where a video overlay key colour is used (along with the co-ordinates of the overlays dimensions) to paste motion video back over the top of the created video image in the RAMDAC. If you've ever opened up a live video window and let a paint programme obscure the video window, you will notice an interesting effect when you use the correct colour (the key colour) to paint in the paint window. The video appears through where you have painted. This opens up an area of huge possibility. Imagine having a live video running behind your text without the need for an external key generator or mixing desk. I've tested this concept using win PowerVCR running on an Nvidia Geforce4. I used PowerPoint to put up my text, with the keycolour of the video card as the background (use a screen dump of your live video window, paste it into a paint package and use the pipette/sample tool to get the rgb value). With the live video window maximized but completely obscured by PowerPoint the overlay is completely in your control to mask in whatever way you see fit.
Ok so imagine that we build the overlay feature into Zion works. We save hundreds of people the cost of a mixing overlay. Obviously they won't get an A/B roll mixer with the nice Timebase correction - but then that's why people pay for desks (interestingly if you use a couple of maplin 4way audio switch boxes on the back of a two channel A/B roll desk you can bounce up your channel numbers to as many as you want without frame drop because the desk is buffering it - we used this for years with yfriday before we could afford a big desk).
Technical restrictions: You need to have a bog standard PCI video card as the control display so that you can free-up the all singing all dancing AGP card for doing the funky video-in/out overlay trick.
Idea 3> Support for video over IP. This is just a pipe dream at the moment. But imagine shuttling video around your venue digitally through Ethernet not horrible old composite or y/c sep analogue. Each CAt5 cable has redundancy for another set of Ethernet lines in it already (IÂ?ve tested this and it works). Slapping two LAN adapters (4.99 each from PCworld) in one machine attached to an adapter that feeds of one Ethernet cable. Bridging software already exists to join the bandwidth giving a hypothetical speed of T-base 200 (400 if youÂ?re talking full duplex). Encoder software is free for download from some of the more adventurous video over IP providers so encoding is not a problem. But what about decoding surely another PC is required at the other end.
Now here is the shortfall - yes. Where will we get cheap beastie PC units that can take IP video and turn it into analogue composite and VGA. At the moment I know of only one and its £100 a pop (from toys r us). The X-Box. Out of the Box it has LAN, video out and guts designed for the purpose of lumping huge quantities of video data around via it's so called 'hyper-transport bus' (A fancy name for a load of wires connecting the North and South Bridges - read more by searching for xbox moding). Once modified the x-box runs Linux and does the job (interestingly there's an open source development of video over IP - sorry I haven�t got the URL).
Any thoughts guys (and gals) - you can slag the ideas - they are open for discussion after all
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God Bless
Diceman
diceman54@mailcity.com