STREAM

04-05-13

STREAM

Test Session

In May 2012 I was asked to do this project as my graduation project and to be responsible for all technical issues on our end. Soon I met with the choreographers Michael Schumacher and Shaun Amyot to talk about the basics. Michael and I discussed a lot of possiblilities over the next half year and there were many possible ways to interpret this technically. But the best way to find this out was to have a test session. So we did in January 2013.

So I designed a basic system for recording and streaming the dancers, just to test the concept and see where we end up. In the end it appeared to be quite good and we didn't have to change that much to the setup.

For this session we just had Thomas as cameraman. Hendrik came by every now and then to watch the rehearsals for lighting. Because this was just a test session without audience my stack was just on stage, in an L shape so I could reach all buttons.

Getting the MAKO to work

When the MAKO came in it didn't work, it basically didn't know how to start up. At first we thought the X-ray from customs erased the internal storage. After a few hacking sessions over the serial port, with the help of Rob Heydari from Ryerson University, we found out that there was just one very important .bin file missing. But we could replace it with an old backup and then it worked again.

HaiVision never heard of this problem and it might sound as a burdon, but to me this made the project extra interesting. Normally you just turn on the machine, enter the right IP address and then it works. Boring.. This way I could really dig into the machine and get to know its core. (Maybe I'm a nerd..)

From then on it worked like a charm and we could rehearse. Thomas could work on camera framing, Michael could work with the dancers to get used to being streamed, Kevin and I could work on streaming and projecting.

For instance on the split screen. Although the MAKO is capable of streaming two streams back and two streams forth, we just used one. But there was one scene where we wanted to use two cameras. Therefore I came up with the idea of using a wipe effect on the mixer half way, so the left part of camera A and the right part of camera B was transmitted. This worked because the projection screens were vertical anyway.

Also we looked into the delay, which wasn't as bad as we anticipated. Just over 400ms back and forth... But for a disciplined dance as ballet that is way to much, so we needed a way to sync it. After quite some discussions this is the way we did it during the test session:

Toronto played the music and streamed it to Amsterdam

Amsterdam danced to that music and streamed it back

Toronto danced to the music recieved from Amsterdam

This way their music is in sync with our dancers and in case of a failure they have a backup solution.

Lucinda Childs

Well known choreographer Lucinda Childs came to school to talk about her work. As we were in the Dancetheatre we hosted this event as well. And since we had the equipment there, we recorded it and displayed it live in the entrance of the school, since there were too many people interested for the capacity of the Dancetheatre.