Laser tracing on video wall

Y

Yash Velguenkar

Member
I have seen videos where lasers draw on video walls following exact content on the video wall. i was wondering how we do that? is there a third party app that integrates with beyond ? how do we carry out those complex mapping sequences? i want to know how to make the laser do it.
 
Laser line draws are, as Bob said, essentially done manually within Beyond. This is the only method I know of for precise laser line draws. If you are looking for automated ways of laser-to-video/audio interaction, there are programs like Touch Designer and Mad Laser that have some features. I'm hoping that Pangolin eventually develops internal features for laser-to-video mapping (fingers crossed).
 
I was always under the impression this was done with the "real time video tracer" feature included with Beyond Ultimate.

I have experimented with Mad Mapper which traces video and works with beyond. This can be effective but i feel needs to be running on Saturn Scanners or be able to work with distrubuted scanning setup (i have yet to do this experiment)
 
It strongly depends on the requirement regarding output quality (line accuracy, output points…) and the content you want to overlay.
Best quality is clearly done if you draw the points and manipulate movements in Beyond directly. Tracing is really limited depending on the complexity. But in case you have access to experts in after effects and/or C4D, they might support your work significantly by implementing position markers in simplified version of the final video content. With this, you can redraw the points and cues much easier in Beyond then.
 
I've always done video tracing manually; it's the only method that I know of. "Automatic" video tracers (within Beyond or otherwise) will give you a very limited output that usually locks you into whatever it's capable of interpreting, and unless you have a very clean image to trace, you'll most likely end up having to do a lot of cleanup. Manually drawing and manipulating within Beyond gives you infinitely more creativity and freedom.
 
My background is as a visual artist and video mapper, long before working with lasers, so mapping and laser tracing were some of the first things I tried. Madmapper does a good job in real time, but it also depends a lot on the type of content. What has worked best for me is tracing the graphics in MM (manually adjusting the parameters for each type of graphic, of course), capturing the graphic in ILDA and cleaning it up from within MM or with the frame editor in Beyond.
IMPORTANT TIPS: If you don't want to draw everything by hand in the frame editor and you have to trace, it's important to do (or ask the AE graphics editor, etc.) that it exports only the line layer I want converted to laser, not the entire graphic animation. For example, if it's a 3-color logo, each color is a separate export, with very defined lines, 1 pixel thick. This way, I can animate each color line separately in the animation. The graphic will always need to be cleaned and optimized, but it's already much faster than doing it by hand.

I've also tried vector options like Ponk,
which is ultra-lightweight, but still needs further development (https://github.com/madmappersoftware/Ponk).

Ultimately, the ideal would be to be able to import vectors directly into Beyond without using external plugins or tricks. I don't know if that's possible today.
 
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