Single Large Canvas

A Single Large Canvas (SLC), launched in r22, is a practically unlimited canvas that users can operate on without having to manually split canvases (i.e. the displays and mappings) or concern for the mechanics and logic of distributing content over multiple machines or for performance. SLC allows users to focus on the creative side without concern for the practical limitations of large scale projects.

Previously, a show going from a small venue with HD screens to a large venue with massive screens had to work around GPU limits - such as the max internal resolution of 16384x16384 pixels of GPUs, - and manually split content across machines so the increased resolution wouldn’t affect performance.

SLC removes these limitations and allows you to operate on massive content as if it was a single large piece of content, while only processing the content that is being output by each individual machine in the session.

SLC works in conjunction with the Media Distribution feature to make working with video at massive resolutions practical.

SLC can be combined with mesh projection to split large canvases across multiple machines.

How to configure Single Large Canvas

The new logic is always enabled, but the SLC configuration is hidden and limited to non-SLC resolutions until explicitly enabled.

1. Tick the “enableSLC” option switch in advanced project settings.
   1. The SLC config is now visible under d3 > Advanced > SLC configuration.
   2. SLC-aware display types (currently projection surfaces and LED screens) now have their default min/max set to 100,000x100,000 instead of 16384x16384.
2. Create a display larger than 16384x16384 or reduce the “Resolution threshold” in the SLC configuration to enable SLC splitting for that display.
3. Create SLC video content:
   1. Split video content into regions smaller than 16384x16384 (most codecs only support 8K) and include a region name into each split in the format _slc_region_<region name>.
   2. Ingest the content and specify the regions inside d3 under <video clip>->Video asset->Regions.

Note

• Versions of d3 prior to r27.7 used the string _region<region name> for region names. This is no longer supported, due to the phrase “region” being commonly used in other content delivery pipelines and causing potential conflicts. The new format is _slc_region_<region name>. To continue using the old _region<region name> syntax then you can enable the useLegacySLCRegionTag option switch in advanced project settings.

SLC currently only supports projection surfaces and LED screens. Other displays are still limited to 16k.

SLC does not currently integrate with any other content than video.