NESTMAP

⇒ You need a camera that can be used as a webcam with a DirectShow driver.
⇒ The camera should return an image of your projection screen that look like as much as possible of your video format. For example, if your video represents a dome in a fisheye format, you need a camera that captures the entire dome screen with a fisheye lens.
⇒ Here are some compatible cameras that work for dome calibration:
 → Kodak PIXPRO ORBIT360
 → Kodak PIXPRO SP360 4K
 → Canon Rebel T6i + Sigma 4.5mm lens
 → Nikon D700 + Sigma 8mm F3.5 Ex DG (via third party webcam app)
 → IDS camera GigE ueye CP + FUJINON fe185c086ha lens

Canon and Nikon cameras use a proprietary driver and they are not listed in DirectShow devices. But Canon DSLR are now directly supported with NestMapV3.0 and used at full potential. For Nikon, you can use a third-party software like Sparkocam to get an HD video of your DSLR when you select "Sparkocam Video" in NestMap.

You should then enable the option "Detect hardware mask" in NestMap settings. NestMap will project a white square on each projector to see any occlusion and compute the blend based on this picture. You can see the result in the MyDocuments/NestMap/CalibPic folder.

If you want to know where a projector in the list is projecting on the screen, you can hold the left mouse button on this particular projector and a red stroke will be shown. The thickness of the stroke is also the recommended blend surface between projectors.

Once the geometric calibration is done, you can fine-tune the brightness and blend parameters. The best method is:
1. Project a pure white image (right-click on the "show grid" button)
2. Adjust the brightness of each projector with sliders in NestMap settings to get uniformity over the center of all projectors.
3. Adjust the "projector Gamma" slider to adjust the blend where the projectors overlap, the default value is 2.2.
4. You can test different solid colors for consistency. You can also change the RGB Color Range from Limited (16-225) to Full (0-255) in your video driver.

For blend calibration, you can use one of the predefined solid colors by right click on the "Show Grid" button. Those colors are specially chosen to magnify most blend defects.

Once the calibration is complete, you can use the mouse scroll wheel and keyboard to adjust the grid to cover the entire screen.
1. Use the keyboard arrows to move the grid center to the center of the dome.
2. With the mouse over the grid preview, use Left Ctrl + Mouse Scroll to zoom and adjust North and South horizon height.
3. If needed, use Shift + Mouse Scroll to stretch in an East-West direction.
4. Finally, use Mouse Scroll to rotate the image to get the North position in front of the dome.

  Note: Holding Left Alt gives you a 10x turbo speed on all adjustments. If you can't correctly adjust the horizon while the grid is centered, it is possible the calibration camera was not correctly placed in the center of the dome. A right-click on the Grid preview will reset all grid adjustments.

This could happen for a few reasons:
⇒ The dot pixels don't reach the minimum light threshold: (see the value set in the setting windows)
 → Check if the projector brightness is high enough.
 → Check if you can increase the camera sensibility.
⇒ The ambient light is too high:
 → Keep ambient light as low as possible.
⇒ The camera resolution is too small:
 → The min. resolution is 1080px, but 2048px or more is recommended.
⇒ Be sure that most dots are visible from the camera.
 
  Note: For the licensed version, you can see the last calibration pictures in the MyDocuments/NestMap/CalibPic folder. NestMap places a + where dots are detected and this could help to diagnose calibration problems.

If you have dots over an object that is not part of the screen, you can disable those dots by:
1. Right-click on the "show grid" button and select "Show Dots", this will show up all dots.
2. With the mouse, navigate through the projector's screens and click on the dots you want to hide (they should turn red).
3. Start a new calibration. NestMap will not project the disabled Dot on screen and will interpolate them with the surrounding dots.
Green dots are important and cannot be hidden.

If you get the correct blend with pure white, red, green, and blue, but not with Dark Orange, Sky Blue, or Purple, this is mostly caused by the projector's color mode or lamp aging. Try to change parameters in projectors. For example, try the "cinema" mode, disable Eco or dynamic brightness, white temperature, etc.

Sometimes it's just impossible to have a perfect blend for all colors with some projectors. In this case, adjust the blend with a bright still frame of your main movie to get the best results.

This could happen for one or many of these reasons:
⇒ Some display drivers use the "limited color space" by default, which restrains RGB values between 16-235:
 → Change the color space to "Full 0-255" could help.
⇒ Some projector technologies have higher black levels than others:
 → Try to fix it by changing projector settings, but maybe consider another kind of projector.
⇒ In NestMap V1.0.0.6 and above, you can use the "Black level adjust" slider if all other solutions are not enough.
⇒ In NestMap V2.0 and above, you can use the "Calibrate Black level after geometry" option to calibrate the black level with the camera. Adjust the number of passes until you have a uniform grey. You will need a low noise camera for a proper black level calibration, like the IDS or a Canon camera.

NestMap can only use Spout surface compatible with DirectX9. If you have this message, this means that the Spout sender uses a DirectX11 surface with a color space that is not retro-compatible with DirectX9.

Try to use the color format DXGI_FORMAT_B8G8R8A8_UNORM. If your project is in Unity, you could use this edited KlakSpout unity package which is already in this color format.

This message is poped by the Spout library and mostly occurs when the Spout surface is created on another GPU than where the main monitor is connected. If you have more than one GPU, please declare one of the projectors connected to the video card the Spout sender is using as the "main monitor" in Windows settings.

No matter the brand of projector, these are the top characteristics:
⇒ Low Black Level.
⇒ High color brightness (brightness in cinema mode).
⇒ Good linear color space.
General advice:
⇒ Use all identical projectors with the same lamp hours.
⇒ Place projectors evenly around the dome.
⇒ Choose the projector's lens to have blends of at least 20 pixels wide.

The high efficiency of Spout and NestMap warping and blending algorithms are optimized when only one GPU is used. The data transfer between multiple GPUs can bottleneck the performance so we don't recommend it.

To use more than four projectors, use 4K video splitters instead. NestMap will consider 4K (3840x2160) outputs as a 2x2 HD projectors array by default. You can easily connect three 4K video splitters on a modern NVIDIA card giving you 12 HD projectors with a single GPU.
Even if NestMap V2.0 has a high-performance dual GPU management, using dual GPU needs an additional Sync card to synchronize all outputs to avoid tearing. This option is only available with high-end card and could costs more than using a single GPU with video splitters.

For the reason mentioned in the preceding point, we don't recommend this setup. But here are some tips if you still wanna try:
⇒ Declare as your main monitor a device connected to the nearest GPU from your CPU
⇒ It's better to connect most projectors on the first GPU to have less data sharing between GPUs
⇒ You can look at the "Offshore" Flag in the NestMap Blend settings tab to see which output is located on the second GPU.

You can use one of the projectors as the main monitor to save a video output if you don't need it during the event. Just check the option "Main monitor is a projector" in NestMap settings.

We don't recommend this setup but follow this procedure to do so:
1. Declare one of the projectors as your "main monitor" instead of your real monitor screen.
2. Start the Spout Sender and NestMap Spout Play while they are still shown on the main projector.
  (if not, you get an "OpenGL can't create context" message)
3. Once Spout is started and working, drag NestMap and the sender software onto your real monitor.
4. To get more fps, minimize or resize NestMap to hide the video preview.

It's a good practice to check your CPU and GPU load for all applications running during dome setup. If GPU load reaches 100%, maybe consider reducing the resolution, fixing the frame rate at 30fps, or consider a bigger GPU. If FPS is low and the GPU load is not 100%, there is maybe a data transfer bottleneck somewhere.

Resolume can use the Window vertical sync signal if enabled in the driver's settings. If not, it can free run to very high fps and waste the precious resources.
Try to enable the vertical sync or limit the fps in the Resolume composition setting to match with your video frame rate to get a constant fps.

NestMap always uses the projector's Vertical sync from the Windows driver.