Free tool
LED wall calculator
Put in the wall. It gives you the pixels per port, how the panels map onto the ports, the power it needs, and whether the processor you own will actually drive it.
The wall
Pitch is what turns millimetres into pixels. It is the distance between two neighbouring LEDs, and it is the one number that connects the hole the wall fills in the room to the load it puts on the processor. The same 500 mm panel is 192 × 192 px on 2.6 mm pitch and 128 × 128 on 3.9 mm — same panel, half again as much processor. And use the panel's maximum watts, not its average — see below for why.
The processor
A Gigabit port carries a fixed number of bits per second, so raising the frame rate or the bit depth lowers the pixels it can carry. This is the setting people forget.
On the controllers whose specification says so, this halves what the device drives. Tick it only if you are really sending a 3D source.
Will it work?
| Limit | The wall needs | It can do |
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The things people get wrong
1. Treating port capacity as one number
It is not one number. A Gigabit port carries a fixed bit rate, and NovaStar publish the arithmetic: at 8-bit a port carries 659,722 pixels at 60 Hz and 329,861 at 120 Hz — exactly half. At 10-bit on an ordinary Armor receiving card, 60 Hz is also 329,861. So a wall that maps perfectly in the shop at 60 Hz runs out of ports the moment somebody asks for 120, and nothing about the wall changed.
2. The pixel count fits but the patch does not
A 14 × 8 wall of 168 px panels is 3.16 million pixels and an MX20 drives 3.9 million, so it looks obvious. It is not. Those columns are 225,792 px each, one port carries two of them, and six ports is twelve columns — not fourteen. The device total says yes and the patch says no. That is why this page reports the limits separately instead of giving you one answer.
3. A column taller than a port
Patch a wall in whole columns and the data cables run straight up and down, which is how you find a fault in the dark. But a tall enough column will not fit on one port at all — 25 panels of 168 px is 705,600 pixels, and no port count fixes that. The patch has to split a column, and it is better to know that at the quote than on the floor.
4. Sizing circuits on the panel's average draw
An LED panel's average draw is roughly a third of its maximum, because average content is not white. Size the circuits on the average and the wall runs all week — then somebody puts a white logo full screen and it trips. Use the nameplate maximum. A 120 V 20 A circuit carries 1,920 W continuously, not 2,400, because a show is a continuous load and a breaker may only carry 80% of its rating.
5. 3D mode takes half the processor
Three of these specifications say it in so many words: when the 3D function is enabled and the video source format is Side-by-Side or Top-and-Bottom, the device output capacity will be halved. A VX1000 drives 6.5 million pixels, and 3.25 million the moment somebody sends it a Side-by-Side source. A wall that was comfortably inside one controller becomes two.
What none of the three documents says is whether the per-port figure halves along with it. The phrase is "device output capacity", which reads as the device total. So this page halves what they state, and where the other reading would change the answer it tells you — because that is a question to put to NovaStar before the truck loads, not one to guess at.
6. kVA is not kW
Worth repeating because it is the one that browns out a show: generators are sold in kVA and rated at 0.8 power factor, so 20 kW of wall is a 25 kVA set, not a 20. The power calculator does the feed, the breaker and the generator for a whole rig.
Where these numbers come from
Each controller's figures are read out of its own NovaStar specification document, named under the table above. Two of those documents print a per-port pixel figure; the rest print only a device total, and where this page divides that total by the port count it labels the answer as derived.
One deliberate difference from NovaStar's own published table: their formula is a strict inequality, and two cells of their table are rounded up past it — 791,667 px at 8-bit 50 Hz works out to 950,000,400 bits a second against a stated budget of 950,000,000. This page floors instead, which satisfies their formula in every cell. Being one pixel conservative costs nothing; being one pixel optimistic is a port dropping frames on site.
Doing this on the actual show
A calculator checks a wall. The real question is where it hangs, what holds it up and what the room sees, and that is what 3D Event Builder is for — lay out video walls, truss, stages and rigging in 3D at real size, with real part numbers, and the pull sheet counts itself. It runs in a browser. Seven days free.