LED panels are flexible building blocks, which means many screens do not fit within standard video resolutions such as 1920x1080. Tessera has a number of tools for dealing with this, including panel rotation, non-standard canvas sizes, cropping/scaling and genlock between multiple processors.
The possibilities are endless, but here are some examples of common scenarios and ways to approach them:
The content is 1920x1080, but the wall is slightly smaller
Often LED panels will not exactly fill a 1920x1080 canvas, for example using 144x144px panels will give a wall that is 1872x1008px. It therefore might be desirable to scale down the content to fit the screen. Tessera M2 and T1 processors have this functionality built-in.
There are four scaling modes, selectable in the Input tab, depending on the desired behaviour, 1:1, Fit, Fill and Stretch:
It also possible to easily constrain the scaler output to 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratios.
The screen has a wide or tall aspect ratio
Live events screens usually won't be a standard aspect ratio. Tessera includes 'non-standard canvas resolutions', selectable in the new project wizard, to better support these situations.
We continue to add new non-standard canvas resolutions. As of v1.1.5 the supported resolutions are:
1600x1200
1080x1920
2880x720
720x2880
When using a non-standard canvas resolution the processor is automatically placed in low-latency mode, which disables scaling and deinterlacing, but most features including Tessera's fully-flexible mapping are retained.
The screen exceeds the capacity of one processor
For very large screens, which will not fit within a single raster, multiple Tessera processors can be easily used together.
Tessera processors can be genlocked to the video input, or to an external reference, and the refresh of the LED panels are perfectly synchronised to the genlock source. This means multiple processors can be used together to build a seamless wall of any size without tearing.
The Tessera Control app gives a way of quickly controlling multiple processors simultaneously. The app provides a way of tweaking input colour adjustments, dimming screen brightness, enabling test patterns and triggering presets. For more in-depth control, Tessera Remote can quickly connect to any processor on the network, and offers full control of the processor.
Tips for choosing content mapping
When working with large screens spanning multiple processors, there are often many different ways of mapping the content across the multiple video feeds. By carefully chosing the canvas size and content orientation, it is often possible to greatly reduce the number of processors required to map a piece of content.
Some things to consider:
Are scaling/deinterlacing features required?
If not it might be better to use a non-standard canvas resolution, for example a 4000x1200 wall can be covered by three processors at 1600x1200, but would require six processors at 1920x1080.
Note that SDI only supports a set of standard resolutions, so non-standard canvas resolutions are intended for use with DVI inputs.
Can the processor count be reduced by rotating the content?
All Tessera processors can rotate panels by 90˚ (and M2/T1 can freely rotate), so it might be better to rotate the content and rotate the panels to match. For example 4000x1200 can be covered by four rotated 1920x1080 feeds rather than six unrotated feeds.
In some circumstances this is preferable to using non-standard canvas resoltuons, for example if your video distribution only supports standard resolutions, or if SDI distribution is used.
Are all of the panels the same pixel pitch?
If not, it might be better to separate the panels by pitch and use the M2's built-in scaling rather than having all processors running in interpolated mode.