A video artist approached me with the following problem: she wanted to play back a recorded performance art piece in "double-wide" format, i.e. two 16:9 videos next to each other.
The video was recorded with a 4k camera (3840x2160 resolution) and then edited and cropped to produce a 4k video file, in which only the "middle vertical slice" contains information (letterbox). After discussing several options, such as using a single 4k projector with a cropped image, we settled on using two FullHD projectors next to each other. Financial considerations played a significant role as well.
Playing back a 32:9 format video on 2 projectors was deemed as too fickle / difficult without using specialized hardware (video wall controllers) or software (e.g. Multi-View HD Pro 2. 2 older mac minis that were lying around seemd good candidates for the job.
The tasks at hand were roughly the following:
- [Cropping Videos with FFMPE