NOVASTAR Kompass FX3 Pro | Logiciel de Lecture Multimédia | Licence Basic, Advanced, Professional

Kompass FX3 Pro is not a box: it is NovaStar's multimedia playback software, installed on a control-room PC. It fills the gap left by LED controllers. A VX600 Pro or an MX40 Pro knows how to receive a picture and spread it across the receiving cards of the wall; it does not know how to build that picture. Kompass FX3 Pro builds it — programs, layers, slices, timeline — and hands it to the controller through the graphics card outputs.

That division of labour is what you need in mind when sizing a control room. A controller's limit is expressed in loading pixels (2.6 million on a VX400 Pro, 13 million on a VX2000 Pro). The limit of Kompass FX3 Pro is expressed in graphics card outputs and decoding throughput. The two are sized separately, and it is almost always the second one that gets underestimated.

Three editions, one engine

Kompass FX3 Pro comes in three licences, activated by registration code or USB authorization dongle. Authorization can be temporary — the software then displays the number of days remaining — or permanent. In trial mode a watermark stays burned into the picture; it disappears as soon as the dongle is recognised.

• Basic — playback and distribution. Unlimited programs, timeline, stacked layers, polygon slices, edge blending, device backup, scheduled playback, keyboard shortcut control. This is the fixed-installation edition: museum, lobby, meeting room, shop window.

• Advanced — adds 3D editing, full output and screen management (connector configuration, sub-output rearrangement), timecode synchronisation on the timeline, the AI assistant (chat and image generation), NDI sources and primary / backup links. This is the edition for mainstream events and corporate work.

• Professional — the complete edition, the one for geometry that is not flat: curved and linear geometric adjustment for panoramic and dome displays, 3D mapping, multi-projector edge blending with gamma, curve correction and black level compensation. This is the edition for immersive scenography, xR stages and installations with dual redundant links.

What the machine has to sustain

NovaStar publishes a reference PC configuration, and it is not decorative: Intel i7 9th generation or newer, 16 GB of DDR4-2666, a discrete NVIDIA P2200 or AMD W5100 graphics card as a minimum, a 512 GB SSD, Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC. The choice of LTSC is not fussiness: it is the only branch of Windows that will not update itself in the middle of a show.

The graphics card is the real tipping point. Below 4K, H.264 is enough and a P2200 carries the load. Above 4K and up to 8K, NovaStar recommends H.265 (HEVC) or VP9, and a card in the RTX A5000 class becomes necessary to decode without stutter. Maximum output resolution reaches 16,384 × 8,192 pixels on suitable hardware, with sub-output segmentation up to a 4 × 4 grid.

Accepted formats

Video: mp4, avi, mkv, flv, mov, mpeg, mpg, ts, wmv, 3gp. Image: jpg, jpeg, bmp, png, gif, ico. Audio: mp3, aac, flac, amr, ape, wav, wma, ogg. Office: ppt and pptx, up to 4K. Plus live sources — NDI, network streams, media collections and Blackmagic DeckLink, YUAN, Chuangshi and Tianchuang capture cards.

Current version

The shipping version is V2.7.0. Kompass FX3 Pro licences are sold by Pixelight with configuration and commissioning: we validate which edition your scenography actually requires, the machine that will carry it, and the full chain through to the controller.

Sizing the control room: two budgets, not one

The most common mistake on an LED project is to size the controller and forget the source. The two budgets are independent, and they are not counted in the same unit.

Controller budget — in pixels. A 5 × 3 m wall at 2.6 mm pitch is 1,923 × 1,154 pixels, or 2.22 million pixels. A VX600 Pro, rated at 3.9 million pixels, carries it at 57 % load. Our resolution and player calculator returns that figure from a single entry.

Software budget — in outputs and decoding. That same wall asks Kompass FX3 Pro for a single 1,920 × 1,200 output, which any professional graphics card delivers. But if the scenography stacks four 4K video layers on that surface, it is no longer the output that saturates but the decoding: four simultaneous 4K H.264 streams is already beyond what a P2200 absorbs comfortably.

The practical rule: size the controller on the wall's surface, size the machine on the number and definition of simultaneous sources. A modest wall fed by a rich timeline demands a far more powerful machine than a wall three times larger showing a single loop.

Why the 4K threshold changes the graphics card

NovaStar places the codec switch exactly where hardware decoding changes nature. Up to 4K, H.264 benefits from a hardware decoder present on every professional GPU for a decade: CPU cost is nil and the card takes several streams. Above 4K, H.264 becomes inefficient in bitrate and NovaStar switches to H.265 or VP9 — two codecs whose hardware decoding is far more demanding. That is why the recommendation moves from a P2200 to an RTX A5000: you are not paying for the resolution, you are paying for the codec it imposes.

A useful corollary when preparing a show: re-encoding media to the recommended format costs less than moving up a graphics card tier. 8K content delivered in H.264 will saturate a machine that would have carried the same content in H.265 without difficulty.

Which edition for which project

The question is not one of budget but of geometry and synchronisation.

• The wall is flat and single, content loops or follows a schedule: Basic. Program management and scheduled playback cover the whole need.

• There are several outputs to arrange, live sources to integrate — a camera through a capture card, an NDI stream from another workstation — or a show to lock to timecode: Advanced. Screen management and timecode synchronisation are the two functions that tip the decision.

• The surface is curved, domed or multi-angled, or several projectors overlap: Professional. Curved geometric adjustment and edge blending with black level compensation have no equivalent in the lower editions.

Redundancy: what the licence actually allows

Kompass FX3 Pro manages primary / backup links between two machines and propagates the primary machine's configuration to the backup. That is source redundancy, not controller redundancy. On a critical event the full chain needs both: two PCs under Kompass FX3 Pro in primary / backup, and a controller with redundant power and links downstream — an H9 modular or an MX40 Pro depending on capacity. Doubling the PC without doubling the controller leaves a single point of failure in the middle of the chain.

Licence and dongle: the point that costs money on tour

USB dongle activation is the most flexible — the licence follows whichever machine the dongle is plugged into, which means changing PC requires no paperwork. Registration code activation ties the licence to a given machine. On a fixed installation, the code is enough. On tour or in rental, the dongle is almost always the right choice: a machine that dies is replaced in five minutes if the licence fits in a USB port.

• Museum and permanent scenography — a timeline scheduled to opening hours, fixed layers, no live source. Basic edition, entry-level machine, dongle left permanently in the rack.

• Conference room and corporate — the screen must accept a camera, a screen share and a graphic overlay simultaneously. Advanced edition for output management and NDI sources from the operator's workstation.

• Concert and festival — the show is locked to an LTC timecode sent by the lighting desk, two machines in primary / backup, a capture card for stage cameras. Advanced edition at minimum, Professional if the set includes curved surfaces.

• xR stage and virtual studio — non-flat geometry, fine calibration, controlled end-to-end latency. Professional edition, RTX A5000 class machine, H-Series controller downstream.

• Retail and shop window — short loop, scheduled playback by time slot, operation without a technician. Basic edition; for a multi-site estate, an asynchronous player such as the TB60 will often be more relevant than a PC running Kompass.

• Install Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC, not a consumer edition. It is the only branch that will not trigger an update mid-show. NovaStar's recommendation here is an operational constraint, not a preference.

• Re-encode media before the show. Above 4K, move to H.265 or VP9; below it, stay on H.264. A file delivered in the wrong codec will stutter a machine that would otherwise have carried the load.

• Count layers, not just pixels. Four stacked 4K streams cost four simultaneous decodes. The wall's definition says nothing about the decoding load.

• Prefer the dongle over the registration code as soon as the rig travels. The code ties the licence to one machine; the dongle makes it transferable to a backup PC in seconds.

• Test the watermark before delivery. In trial mode the watermark stays burned in. It disappears as soon as the dongle is recognised — check it at acceptance, not on show day.

• Segment sub-outputs rather than adding cards. The 4 × 4 grid splits one physical output into several logical zones: often enough where a second graphics card was being considered.

• Double the source AND the controller. Kompass's primary / backup protects playback; it does not protect sending. On a critical event, redundancy must be continuous through to the receiving cards.