Setting up the Environment
Table of Contents
The Director is a control application that cannot create any 3D output by itself. Instead, it manages one or multiple Ventuz Presentation Runtimes and instructs them what to do. The Presentation Runtime interprets those commands and loads the required Ventuz scenes. Moreover it assets, plays animations and does the steps necessary to produce the proper 3D output. Therefore setting up the Ventuz environment and machine communication is of great importance.
Channels
The Director’s concept is built around the idea to work with separate channels; separate feeds of content. Much like an audio application can have separate channels (tracks) for vocals, guitars and drums, which mixed together produces a single song, the Director can provide multiple channels to manage separate content within a single show. A channel allows multiple machines to connect to the same stream of templates and/or to have multiple layers of content on the same machine. For example, a single operator may drive the content of a game show on a big screen wall in one channel, while also controlling other displays for the audience with a completely different feed in another channel.
A typical Director show consists of a single channel. This is sufficient for the majority of applications and the reason why most of this documentation won't explicitly refer to multiple channels. All concepts of Director that are introduced in the following chapters extend to working with multiple channels and it is therefore left to the later chapters such as Topology or Channel Configuration to discuss the more advanced scenarios.
Topology
Which machines are actually attached to a channel is specified in the active Topology. A topology can be created, modified and saved via the Topology Editor which is usually done by the IT department managing the machines way before any show is run on a given setup. The Ventuz Director operator simply selects the correct topology from the empty workbench and launches his show.
In addition to the topologies stored in the local machine's configuration folder, the list of available topologies always contains a simply default topology for the local machine called (local). This configuration is ideal for new users that want to learn Director, working with remote machines is discussed in a dedicated chapter.
Ventuz Machine Service (VMS)
Director talks to a Ventuz Runtime via the Ventuz Machine Service (VMS). This Windows service is installed during your Ventuz installation process and will be automatically started whenever the machine reboots. The main purpose of the VMS is to broadcast machine information onto the local network and allow Director to start an instance of the presentation runtime, even if Director is running on a different machine!
For Director to be able to talk to the VMS, any installed firewall has to allow TCP communication on the port 20405!
The user interface for the VMS is pretty minimal. By clicking on the VMS icon in the Windows system tray, the operator can specify project folders that should be made available via the VMS and trigger a re-scan of those folders. When Director tells a VMS to start the Ventuz Runtime, the VMS searches those folders for the required local copy of the project.
If Director reports an error as it failed to find a project, make sure your project is located in a folder (or sub-folder of) that is part of the VMS configuration list and trigger a manual scan of projects.
- VMS with a valid connection to a Ventuz Runtime (green status)
- A running Ventuz Runtime
The VMS provides much more functionality such as remote hardware configuration but for the scope of this manual, starting the Presentation Runtime and locating projects is its sole purposes. For more information on the VMS, see Ventuz Machine Service in the Ventuz Designer user manual.
Pipes
Each channel connects to two so-called pipes provided by the Ventuz Runtime: Program and Preview. Each pipe has an independent output and a template engine that controls the content shown on that pipe. Both can be configured inside the Device Configuration on the Pipe Mapping section. But usually pipe mapping in Ventuz 7 is only needed if you are mixing different devices or different types of ouputs, because by default the Director will open all pipes needed for your configuration. The Program Pipe usually shows the final result the audience will see. The Preview Pipe is used to provide visual feedback to the operator while he is editing a template.
