Over the past decade, the team at Intermediate Engineering (ImEn) has developed countless custom scheduling and playout solutions for exhibitions, media facades, and architectural installations. Their common challenge has been providing complex playout systems designed for skilled tech users to meet high expectations regarding performance and stability, particularly for users who simply want to ensure that their content plays correctly and looks as intended—without worrying about the technical underpinnings. Out of that need, PRISM was born.
PRISM is a production-ready hybrid between a signage system and a media server, purpose-built for handling complex, often non-standard media surfaces while remaining accessible for everyday users. TouchDesigner plays a central role in the playout layer, and ImEn is eager to share how and why they designed it this way.
Derivative: Starting from the top, what is PRISM and what is it built for?
ImEn: PRISM is our solution to a challenge we've faced repeatedly: bridging the gap between high-performance media playout for special media surfaces (think TouchDesigner, Vertex, Pixera, …) and user-friendly content management (think signage systems — but adapted for the needs of big screens).
It’s a system built to support:
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Complex media surfaces (multi-display LED walls, pixel-mapped facades, creative screens)
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Scheduling requirements (make sure your content gets played out exactly when and how much you need it)
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Human workflows (so that everyone can start using it quickly).
PRISM is a Content Management System for premium media surfaces, with features that allow scaling it over several buildings, playing to hundreds of different surfaces while providing a simple and intuitive user interface for non-tech users. Regardless of how complex the media installation may be—making the interface simple and adding useful guarding functions helps us prevent accidental errors and is just one more step towards ensuring your content gets played just as intended.
So, PRISM is a tool for media playout, but in the long run. It is designed to keep things flexible, extensible, and interchangeable, not only hardware-wise, but also software- and content-wise. We integrate third-party media servers, so if there already is a media server in an installation or you want to trust your go-to solution, PRISM can adapt to your needs. This also helps with scaling and maintaining setups over long timespans.
However, if you want to have an all-in-one solution, we offer our own playout system built with TouchDesigner at its core.
Derivative: Can you explain why you decided to build on TouchDesigner?
ImEn: PRISM is intended to make complex playout scenarios easy to handle, no matter how diverse and different they are! One day you might need to push as many pixels as you can, then you might need to control a variety of DMX or led lights next to some video wall. The system we built in TouchDesigner allows us to scale quickly and efficiently through various demands using a building block principle. With many protocols already being implemented and its great toolkit of texture-operators adapting to the specific needs and devices, any situation becomes a breeze. Some of the reusable blocks we build include:
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Generic Layers implementing a transition system
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GPU-based pixel mapping and scalable ArtNet-Output
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Quick MQTT-Parameter binding for any parameter inside TouchDesigner
Derivative: Who did you develop PRISM for?
ImEn: We mainly concentrate on meeting the demands of two groups of people:
Content Creators, Managers and Agencies upload, organize, and schedule media via the web interface. They never interact with TouchDesigner directly - and why would they? Their interest is to manage the content in the system, schedule playout in the calendar, and access reports and statistics. They see the bigger picture, compose content and create stunning moments - but surely don’t want to get lost rolling out files to media servers.
We want to assist them, e.g. by providing tools to assign content-assets to one or more video surface(s), validating media files or custom thumbnails (especially when working with loads of predistorted content). We believe that minimizing the potential for human errors takes you one step further towards really stable playout. No matter the rush, viewers in front of our screens will always get a smooth experience.
Integrators & Planners plan or set up the hardware and want a stable system for an application that is (probably) meant to be used for a long time with limited maintenance. Whenever the use case appears too complex for usual signage systems, either because of their limited video processing capabilities or missing (comfort) functions for media handling, our application will shine.
PRISM is built to support great vertical and horizontal scaling which comes in handy not only for large deployments, but also for fail safety. Especially for installations running years (or even over a decade!) you probably want a system that allows for replacing or advancing parts of the system with different hardware or software. Hardware might fail at some point, products might be discontinued or cheaper/better suited products might appear and oftentimes being tied to one vendor leads to rising costs in the future.With a flexible system that non-tech users can safely use, fail safety becomes a topic of financial investment into the hardware and can be scaled according to the respective requirements.
Derivative: What are PRISM's most important features?
ImEn: Our feature list is expanding quite fast lately, but we ensure to build a simple and reliable system. Some of our interesting features are:
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Thoughtfully designed web-based user interface and workflows adapting to the needs of content managers.
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Calendar-based playout.
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Proof-of-play.
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Wide media format support including interactive media (various video and image formats, websites, streams and even .tox).
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High performance playout system that adapts to the needs of each deployment quite easily.
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Webplayer for easy and budget-friendly advancing the system to standard 16 x 9 surfaces.
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Hardware (and to some regard even Software) vendor and product-independence.
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Controlling (theoretically) unlimited devices in a group with one stream, either for backup scenarios or content distribution (or both).
And of course, with more than ten years of experience, we can assist in identifying appropriate configurations for different use cases, including hardware specifications and software setup. A complete system featuring a CMS and Playout Server is also available, preconfigured and tested for easy installation.
Derivative: What makes PRISM different from a “digital signage” solution?
ImEn: Digital signage tools are great for simple screens, basic loops, maybe some HTML content. But they usually fall short when:
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You need real-time effects or mappings
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Media surfaces have non-standard formats.
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High-quality playout is needed (e.g. high resolutions, refresh rates, HDR, …).
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You want to prevent human error in high-value media installations.
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Surfaces of different forms shall follow a central artistic approach.
PRISM provides the reliability and usability of a signage system with media server-level power underneath. Artists can change the mood of a whole building, applying a central artistic style to all media surfaces with one click. Admins can sleep well because the users can’t break the playout. And the UI does not overwhelm people who are new to the system.
Derivative: Do you have any tips or thoughts for other teams using TouchDesigner in similar ways?
ImEn: Definitely!
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Embrace configuration files. A stateless TouchDesigner patch that adapts dynamically is a game changer for maintainability and scalability. And you get quite some documentation for free!
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Separate responsibilities. Let TouchDesigner do the heavy lifting for media playout but find different tools to manage user-interaction and validation, timers, scheduling, databases, and data management. This will help you a lot in building a modular, expandable, and interchangeable tech stack.
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Keep information in one place. Especially when distributing logic between operator networks and Python scripts. TouchDesigner often encourages you to use an event-driven architecture using a lot of callback scripts. We try to keep those minimal and make them call logic defined where our main logic is defined (most of the time in our Extension objects—by the way we really recommend using them).
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Concept before implementation and don’t be afraid to follow great ideas. When we started, we discussed the structure of our software quite a lot and avoided setting up the patch using the Python API. After we verified our ideas of which building blocks we needed, it became quite easy to make the patch load dynamically using our configs. A good core structure will make your patch scale and advance well, so take your time and embrace great architecture!
Derivative: PRISM is a commercial product that is available now?
ImEn: Yes it is. PRISM has been deployed in various settings over the years and is ready for new applications. We welcome connections with integrators, technicians, architects, artists, or agencies involved in complex, long-term installations. If anyone any questions or would like to talk further, please reach out, we like discussing our products, whether it's delving into technical aspects or having a casual conversation and are happy to provide more information.