When I crossed over from the television broadcast domain to the live events market a few years back, there was a fairly steep learning curve. With LED walls, I figured that you simply connect a video signal to the LED wall. It turns out that an important video processing gadget is required between the input video signal and the LED wall — the LED digitizer. With minor variations, all digitizers perform the same basic functions – they translate video into pixels. On the input side, some digitizers accept only one video format (e.g., SDI), while others accept a variety of video formats, including our favorite flavors: analog RGB, SD-SDI, HD-SDI and DVI. If the digitizer only takes a single input, you’ll need a scaler to convert your format to the digitizer’s preferred input format. Once accomplished, you can take just about any video device display its image on an LED wall via the digitizer…On the output side, digitizers send data to an LED wall instead of video. Depending on the manufacturer, some digitizers connect to a single wall only, while others can drive multiple walls, with separate output banks that can drive both new generation and legacy LED tiles simultaneously.
—Paul Berliner, from “Video World,” PLSN, Oct. 2011
