After a few months Realtime Mania is online again. Christan Schmidt former Ventuz product-manager and Ventuz guru decided to bring his blog back to life. We took the vote and think this is great.
http://realtimemania.spaces.live.com/default.aspx
Besides his english is a lot better than mine and maybe he’ll give us the honour to welcome him as author on our blog.
Who doesn’t get this one, should be glad about it. (hmm well … anyway this can only be understood by the one’s who understand it).
And as always - whoever can beat this - e-mail us…
This should be released in the category: "Things we always wanted to have inside Ventuz - and which already exist - but nobody told us:" As we don’t have this category (yet 
) it probably belongs to "needfull things."
It’s not always possible to estimate the exact performance of a scene inside the Ventuz Designer. Inside the Presenter it would work, but the framerate is not displayed there.
Wrong! As I learned yesterday: As a matter of fact there is the possibility to show the framerate/performance in the Presenter.
But it only works on the command level:
Open the cmd shell then change to the Ventuz directory and enter: VentuzPresenter.exe Name.vpr -stats or simply create a *.bat text document, which could look like this:
cd C:\Programme\"Ventuz Technology Group"\"Ventuz 2006 Professional Edition"\
VentuzPresenter.exe c:\temp\name.vpr -stats
Then save as Start.bat on the desktop and that’s it.
Besides the "- stats" function there is another useful option inside the Presenter "-noesc". It blocks the Esc-key. Therefore a Ventuz presentation can not be stopped with Esc accidentally. To stop a presentation you now have to change into window-mode(Alt+Enter) and close the program. If this window function was disabled while exporting the presentation, the only way left is to use the task-manager…
Thanks to Karol from the Ventuz dev crew.
Playing EVE-Online the other night I took a closer look at some of the effects they are able to create within the game. Some of them are as powerful as they are simple. I would like to show you how to create the effect of a screen within you Ventuz project.
First you create the pixel map of RGB-pixels in Photoshop.
As seen in tv commercials or on websites - it’s very popular to use glass-look graphics.
Working for Microsoft at the Cebit 2007 to create the stunning speaker presentations we used a lot of this glass texture effects based on the Aero-UI of Windows Vista…
But how to create a nice looking glass button?
One thing about a nice “glass effect” is the fact to use always a sharp and smooth edge.
Let’s take a look on the pictures to describe in more detail what i mean by that:
Something seems to be wrong with the name Ventuz. It looks like nobody is using it willingly. Meaning they use the software but not the name. I noticed the following phenomenon, among some companys working with ventuz. Everybody behaves like he just invented a revolutionary software, not telling anybody how he realizes his projects. The "revolutionary" software is then called Eventmaster or Soft FX. In Dubai I got to know three companys that work with Ventuz but don’t admit to do so. It’s kind of a shame to get a Ventuz license and to put the whole thing as a new software solution on the homepage afterwards. Especially when the pictures shown are stolen from the Ventuz website (Guess you didn’t ask for permission to use these pictures).
O.k. everybody wants his little advantage in competition - but is this the way?
My appeal to you is: If you’re cooking with water - then name it as it is: water.
The idea behind it is very simple. When using 2 computers, from which each one is outputting a resolution of 2 x 3072 by 768 in horizontal span mode and split by two analog versions of the Matrox TripleHead2Go into 6 signals showing one continuous picture you will run into the problem of switching between them. The initial idea was to switch directly after the computers, which would have left us with only two signal ways for master and backup solution. Unfortunately we couldn’t find a KVM-switch processing the necessary resolution. The best solution in terms of performance would have been to take 6 Folsom HD ImagePRO and get them remote controlled by a small Encore system or something in that line. But the lack of availability and budget forced us to come up with a new and cheaper idea. So we kept the thought of remote controlled switches. After some research we found the Pocket KVM Switch SW0206C from Equip. This model has a spring-loaded switch that lets you toggle between PC 1 and PC 2. When turning it on it will reset to the default input PC 1. That was exactly what we needed. To make a long story short, all we needed from there was a sure hand, a soldering set, some cable, a new spring-loaded switch, some heat shrink tubes and a power supply. We bought 6 SW0206C opened them and removed the original switch. On each of the KVMs we put a green cable on (+) and a red cable on (-). Then combined all red and green cables and led them into our new spring-loaded switch. And here are some pictures:
Everything worked extremely well. The result was amazing. There was just one little issue. How do you get a little white box with many green and red cables sticking out and that looks like a bomb through the security check of the world’s supposedly best secured airport? That’s very simple. You don’t, at least not without getting asked a great deal of questions. Well, after we finished building it everybody thought it looked like a bomb and I should carry it in my hand luggage to be at least able to explain what it is or show its functionality. We agreed on that because we thought that if there was no one to explain they would just detonate it without the risk of even opening it. Everything came as we had expected. Of course we got pulled out and yes we had to open it and show what it was. Someone was with me that translated into Arabic. Maybe it was in his translation, but one of the Ladies in the room took her hand and tried to grab into the box and pull one of the KVMs out. I was moderately nervous and didn’t want her to destroy our master/backup switch, so I shouted “Stop!-Don’t”! That again must have scared the crap out of them because everybody jumped back and took on a protective pose. So in case you ever end up in a situation like this. Do not shout or even make unpredicted moves with a box in your hands when you are standing on an airport for security questions. Try to remember not to shout. This is very important. Very important!
One of our last projects was realized on a real large-scale screen, which also turned out to be an excellent Ventuz workspace.
The screen was 28 meters wide. For the 5120×1024 projection we worked on a Nvidea 8800, using the two VGA outputs together with two dualheads from Matrox.
FYI Our personal record was the 70 meters wide screen for adidas. But that already dates back some time.
Another fine (and above all actual) example for a real large Ventuz projection can be found on the rayd website. http://www.rayd.de/index.php?id=20 or here:
Rayd realizes Nespresso Launch in Austria
http://www.ventuz.com/company/press/archive/news_nespresso.aspx
And this is to all of you always complaining that there are no video tutorials avaible. Please look at this tutorial first - and then you can complain that there are no video tutorials avaible.
My experience shows me that even after three years a lot of people still don’t know this one. And YES, I know it’s alittle bit old, but for those who have problems getting into Ventuz it is still good enough.
I regret but I belong to the species of Ventuz artists, who don’t know how to script. Yes they exist. I try to solve most of these things with expressions, only to hear from the Species who know how to script, that everything could be done a lot easier.(Guys your’re really helping me - and I would never think that you’re arrogant.)
Now the problem, which isn’t kind of an everyday one, occured that i need a specific syntax. Again and again I ask myself every six months how this or those syntax for an OR-AND etc. expression looks like. (At this point I want to thank Karol from Ventuz for listening to my ever-repeating questions and for answering them with patience over and over again.)
Assuming that I’m not the only one, here’s a list of different syntaxes for the expressions in Ventuz. (I found this list somewhere and it’s probably a 120 years old, but as I don’t want to check all of them again, I just post it like this. So there’s no guarantee for being complete or functioning - if you have more information about this, please send an e-mail to Info (at) stereolize.com)
Ventuz (C#.NET) Expression Syntax
