Combining two projectors for a cinema-sized screen?

[peanutismint]

I'm trying to combine the outputs of two massive 7k projectors to create one massive cinema-sized screen in a lecture theatre where I work. Our display machine is running Windows 7 and is using an nVidia GeForce GTX 260 which has 2 x DVI outputs.

We've got the projectors lined up perfectly; weve used the soft edge blending function to eliminate any sign of where one screen ends and another begins. All that's holding us back now is the ability to fullscreen a video playing from an application like VLC so that it covers both displays.

If we fullscreen a video at present, it will only maximise to the size of one of the displays. Now I know that my computer at home has an ATI card which I know is capable of spanning a single desktop over two displays, as opposed to 'extending' the desktop onto a second display, so is this possible on an nVidia card? I read something about them taking the 'horizontal spanning' option out of their drivers? And someone else said that it's been taken out of Windows 7 too....??

We've also tried using that Ultramon program, and have even resorted to buying a Matrox 'TripleHead2Go' box which is supposed to split massive resolutions into separate displays, but we've yet to get either option to produce the result we require...

Any ideas what we could do? Is there any way to make a program like VLC allow a video to fullscreen across multiple displays??

 

[peanutismint]

Thanks for the bits of info guys. Just as an update on this, we ended up finding a filter plugin built right in to VLC that splits your video into two separate windows (one on one screen, one on the other) which then both 'fullscreen' when you double-click, theoretically giving you half the image on one screen, half the image on another. There's even options to set an overlap in the middle to help the two images blend, and to change the brightness/saturation of the blend etc, very cool.

Anyway, it's not picture perfect; we're still fine-tuning but from nothing it's looking pretty darn good!! Just in time for putting our film exhibition license to good use!

If anyone has any more tips, please let me' know.

 

[peanutismint]

Haha you should totally do it!!

Ours is actually a big hall in a students union which usually hosts the likes of Motorhead, Pendulum and Sum 41, but the university owns the building itself so they decided a couple of years ago to install bleacher seating and make it lecture-ready. So it's a tad larger than your average lecture theatre....

Here's a picture I tweeted on the day:

http://yfrog.com/n36dqj

As you can probably make out, the projectors have quite different colour temperatures, unfortunately, due to the age of the lamps (when one failed, instead of springing for 2 x new ones at the same time, they just replaced one, meaning the 2 x screens never look exactly the same.....) but I reckon we can alter the colour temps of each display independently in VLC.

For the actual film events we're gonna hire a proper 400 inch theatre screen so the image should look even better.

p.s. Some days I kinda almost love my job.........

 

[peanutismint]

We've found a guy on ebay who sells the screen material - gona buy a 20' by 9' piece and make our own scaff frame - that's a 266" screen!!