Multiple video channels & Cinelerra

There was briefly support for multiple video channels in the early 2000's.  It was a brief chapter in the interest of supporting multi display concerts.  It took a lot of effort.  There were settings for 16 X servers.   Never mind the practicality of sending 16 uncompressed video streams over a network or even the PCI bus of the time.  Young lion was nowhere close to being able to afford more than 1 monitor, let alone the kind of projectors that would have needed. 

The complexity of keeping that support around in the OpenGL age, the widening of video aspect ratios, & the lack of any envisioned use quickly canceled it.  There were a lot of triple pointers.  It never got to the point of sending different tracks to different video outputs with a panning tool, so it was never close to being functional.

Multi channel output was manely a very specialized player feature.  Cinelerra had a big future as a player, but not that specialized.  A better way to do it was to just generate a very wide single video channel, export slices of the video channel in a 2nd pass.  Then use a dedicated playback program to send it to multiple displays.  The dedicated playback program might use bits of Cinelerra but would definitely have its own output class.

What about the parallel universe where Cinelerra did go all the way with multi channel video?  It might have had a role in the brief 3D craze.  It might have had a role in the age of virtual sets.  The problem is all these roles would have been lion hobbies only.  No-one else ever used Cinelerra for anything but simple compositing tests in pure software mode.

Projectors with anywhere near enough resolution to justify multiple channels never came down in price.  Multiple cheap 320x240 projectors would have been useless in lieu of a single 1920x1080 projector.  Multi LCD displays continued to be extremely expensive. The original concept of multiple 720x480 projectors would have looked terrible by today's standards.

The legacy of those early days lives on in the form of multi layer support in the Quicktime & libmpeg3 readers.  There's no way to generate those files except maybe multiplexing multiple video files in ffmpeg.  Multi layer support dates back to the very beginning in 1999, long before multiple output channels were conceived or lions had any idea of the need.

DVB briefly generated those streams, then became encrypted.  DVD's never used multiple layers.  They used a tree structure to achieve multiple angles.  The multi angle feature was a flop that didn't survive in the HD age.  Multi layer DVB streams were impractically large.  They always had to be demuxed before editing.  That left no practical source of multi layer streams.

When ffmpeg took over most decoding, supporting multiple layers would have been super complicated for a type of file which no longer existed.  That's basically what happened to multi layer files & multiple output channels.

There is but 1 possible use of multi layer files & multiple output channels.  Nested EDLs are sort of limited in only having 1 video track.  What could be done with a single nested EDL with 2 video tracks & a single sound track is now done with 2 EDLs with 2 independent sound tracks which must be synchronized.  It's a very minor impact on the usage pattern.  The time required to fully implement it & debug it would be many years.

A lot of early features were based on the idea that it was going to be a commercial product, appealing to users of features lions would never use.

What could have been done if the process from the beginning was focused on just what was needed?  Maybe young lion would have gotten bored.  The trick is lions never felt too much of any of their past was spent at the console, as other animals do.  Perhaps more time would have been spent on toy projects like commodore demos.

 

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All the way up to the 1st winter getaway.  They didn't stay for the 1st winter.  The cabin is only 625 sq ft.

 

They showed their gay neighbor's insulated geodesic dome, a cheap way to get a large indoor space, but the lack of a real window would get depressing.  It made lions ponder geodesic domes & how far away they're traveling to the gay neighbors.  Being gootube stars, they probably aren't anywhere near the lesbians, but the lesbians do sleep over sometimes.  Being around the lesbians for any amount of time would entail a full dose of of mano a mano.

They have another gootube channel https://www.youtube.com/@tylerandtodd/videos but lions don't have the stomach for that type of romance.  They seem to have built a shipping container house & a large solar panel since then.

Lions would not be allowed to build a geodesic dome.