Video Road Test

ImageCue, from Southern California-based ImageCue LLC, is the new media playback controller developed by CEO Bill Hewlett and distributed by A.C.T Lighting. Launched at InfoComm 2015, the ImageCue is a media server option that is particularly well suited for projects with small budgets that require DMX controlled media playback but not the real-time compositing features of a full-featured media server.

 New Panels Distributed by SHS Global

There was a time in the not-so-distant past that video walls, let alone “LED” video walls, were a complete luxury reserved only for those with big-enough wallets. I remember (not fondly, mind you) setting up huge rear-projection cube-based cabinets that took up an entire truck for what amounted to a 10-by-14-foot surface. We’d manually tweak the pincushion graph settings (red, green and blue) on each cube until a barely passable picture would emerge on a not-so-bright rear surface that was four feet deep and weighed thousands of pounds. There was one particular time when….oh crap! It was only a dream! Whew….let me wipe the sweat off and get a hold of myself.

One of the big challenges for the AV switching market is to find the right combo of just how much to put in a switcher and what to leave out. There are plenty of single-space, MIMO-type boxes out there, but invariably you’ll end up having to use a bunch of adapters and powered mini-converters to get the job done.

I am checking out Martin’s latest video product, the VDO Sceptron 10. The fixture is a single strip of LEDs built into a 1-meter sturdy aluminum frame. The VDO in the name stands for video, as in the RGB LEDs used in the fixture are the same type used in LED video tiles. The #10 dictates the pixel pitch of this particular fixture (as in 10mm).

There was a time in the not-too-distant past that video racks were big. Not because we needed room for all the blinky lights or Star Trek navigational gear. The reason was because video people, like our audio cousins, tend to be very …um…. thorough (read retentive to a fault).