I work for a small productions company in Emeryville, CA and in our edit suites, we use AJA Kona breakout boxes to monitor our computers SDI video Out to broadcast monitors and to our internal video network (so our producers can spy…hahaha). To my knowledge, Blender doesn’t have any way of sending a video out signal through the SDI out of my Kona card, so I’m curious as to what it would take/ cost to have someone write a script which would allow this to take place.
Ideally, all I would need to the script to do is to constantly send the camera view through my AJA Card to my Broadcast monitor (maybe by enabling a feature or two?). This would allow me to work with clients to see a color corrected image on a large screen (rather than my computer), it would also allow my producers to monitor my work without having to make the trek into my office.
Again, I know almost nothing about scripts or whether this would be a hard or easy thing to do, people can feel free to PM me with what it would take/ cost to come up with something like this.
I’d be happy to answer any questions anyone has about any more specific information they would need to accomplish this script.
Can you setup a second monitor that mirrors its display to your broadcast monitor?
In Blender you can press: CTRL+ALT+W to duplicate the entire interface for multi monitor views. You can also click View->Duplicate area into new view for just the camera view then press CTRL+Up Arrow to maximise it. You can also click the Window menu at the top and do Full Screen to remove the title bar. Does this help at all?
I think D3Pixel has the right idea, though maybe not mirroring your main display.
If i’m interpreting this correctly, it sounds like you might be able to set up your SDI video to output from your computer’s desktop? If that’s the case, you could probably treat it as a separate display, and just put a Blender window with either the viewport camera view, a preview render view, or the output render on the “display” that is output over SDI. That way (assuming things work nicely) your desktop (with the Blender window) would be visible on the broadcast monitor or to your producers.
That being said, I have zero experience with production video setups, SDI video, or AJA products.
As for a scripting solution, I have had struggles trying to just get scripts to read from the output render, much less a realtime window.
Thank you both very much for replying, D3Pixel, I do have a second monitor on my computer setup right now. I generally use that for Dope sheet, Graph editor, Action Editor, etc… Unfortunately, however, there is no way I’m aware of to mirror the computers monitor through my AJA card to the broadcast display.
Tavi, The integration between the computers SDI output through the AJA card does not allow me to use that window as just another monitor for my desktop.
I’ve spoken with AJA support about this and they do offer a lot help and support for programs to get them to integrate their software interface or SDK with the AJA hardware. I asked them if they thought that may be some I (who has 0 programming experience) could handle and was basically told no… However, someone who has a lot of programming experience could work with AJA through their free SDK support window and be able to create the necessary line of communication between blender and AJA.
Thank you both again so much for your replies. I look forward to hearing what you think about the SDK integration with AJA.
-Matt
I can offer you only to visit the directx sdk’s graphedt program’s documentation and then you will have to write an interface file for the assembly types which are going to be offered from the vendor’s driver in graphedt, unless you do not wish use python dependency module win32com.