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Jake Rodkin

The result was you could - either in semi-realtime in After Effects or with a rendered video - send motion graphics to the orb in realtime and then tweak it, and try again very quickly. It also meant doing things like adding rim lights to the Steam Deck in the center of the orb was as simple as drawing some rectangles in OBS. Here’s a video of the packed 4K grid streaming over to the orb in OBS:

19 comments
Jake Rodkin

It meant we could capture some truly bananas footage lit entirely in-camera that both looked beautiful and really showcased the power of the displays in the new hardware (whether secretly or overtly, depending on if the viewer figured out what they were looking at). Also it meant we got to build a huge video orb, which I imagine is a life goal shared by many.

You can see these videos at much higher res and also check out the Steam Deck at steamdeck.com

Chuck Jordan

@ja2ke This makes me happy because you’re getting to do shit I know you love

At what point did you inadvertently create Max Headroom?

Jake Rodkin

@SasquatcherGeneral we deliberately plugged a webcam in at some point pretty early on and the results were mostly a tangled mess because we never set it up to work with the packed grid to output in an organized way to the orb. But it was worth it all the same. And yes uh this was super fun to work on.

Laserschwert

@ja2ke Damn, that's so fucking cool! It would have been easy to just 3D-render the whole thing, but that would have taken a lot of the fun out of it. It's so great that Valve allowed for the resources to put this together.

Jesse Wagstaff

@ja2ke
Very cool creative project with awesome results! Thanks for sharing a behind the scenes look.

David Connell

@ja2ke this is so frickin cool thank you for sharing!

Miguel Friginal

@ja2ke I have to ask, given ours (Whisker Squadron: Survivor) was one of the lucky games featured in these videos, why not name the games used either in the video itself or somewhere in the site? Attribution would have been nice

Beryl Nutter :steggy:

@ja2ke this is a really tremendously good video, I appreciate very much that it's a hand with nail polish reaching in at the end, and I just wish I played anything other than Tetris Effect connected on my current steamdeck to justify getting one haha

jaf
@ja2ke i am more excited about the increased dram speed and power optimization
Andrew Langley

@ja2ke Awesome work. Jealous you got to put something like this together.

Jake Rodkin

@telarium I’m jealous of myself! During the production and shoot I spent most of the time anxious that it’d turn out looking like anything, or would miss the deadline. Now that it’s done, I’m nostalgic for this other version of me that made something rad.

Paul Puccio

@ja2ke as a videographer who loves messing with tech GODDAMN this rules so hard

Ozzelot :anarchy: :linux:

@ja2ke I am now a big fan of the orb. But I must ask, can it be pondered? Was it pondered?

remote procedure chris

@ja2ke wow! this came together so fantastically, it was animated really well too, what a cool idea and presentation. i love shit like this

Dennis

@ja2ke Always love seeing people use OBS in ways we never could've imagined :)

Dennis

@ja2ke Did you send out a single 4K stream and then crop it on the receiver end, or did you actually send out individual NDI feeds for every unit?

Jake Rodkin

@Dennis It was one 4K stream multicast out and everyone received it then cropped to their little square in OBS. We wrote a Python script that went down the line and modified each Deck’s OBS scene config to crop to the appropriate square in the template (and then crop in an additional pixel or two to reduce sub pixel bleed at the edges where you might see another screens image intrude a little). Meant each Deck was less than quarter res, but it was fine for the video where most are backgrounded.

Jake Rodkin

@Dennis For close-ups we ran a local full screen video in a new scene, instead of the stream. (The full screen game close-ups, and the final logo resolve.)

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