Sometimes a Full HD Projector is Overkill

[basspig]

I just finished up a week as Technical Director at the Kent Film Festival, up here in Kent, CT.

While I didn't have a hand in selecting the equipment used, I did put my effort toward getting the most out of it. All of it was loaned to the Festival by Sony Corp.

Here's what we used:

HDW 1800B x 2
PMW-EX30
Sony Blu-ray player
VPLFW41 projector

The digiBeta/HDCam decks were great, except for some quirks having to do with changing master clock frequency when playing tapes recorded in 23.98, vs. tapes in 59.94Hz, a procedure which involved wading through menus, entering clunky commands and rebooting the deck via power cycling. Running a 23.98 tape in a deck configured for 59.94 resulted in video with no sound and flashing VU meters. However, running a 59.94 tape with a deck configured for 23.98Hz resulted in the deck promptly ejecting the tape!

The PMW-EX30 is essentially the recording deck from the cameras in the CineAlta EX line. It has the neat capability of converting HD-SDI to HDMI in realtime. We used it to interface the DigiBeta deck to the projector.

The projector is really a business projector, with 700:1 contrast ratio, 4500 lumens from a 275W UHP bulb (hard to believe & didn't look like it either) and WXGA resolution of 1280x800.

Originally, they had a 10x12' screen setup. After consulting with the founder of the event, we hired a local company to bring in a 25x15' screen. The guy walked in with what looked like two laundry bags over his shoulders! It was a muslin cloth with a rayon or nylon type fabric. We spent the next hour hanging and stretching it out. After masking the screen, it looked pretty good.

Now with this gargantuous screen, set in the procenium arch of a stage at the Community Center in Kent, we had a screen that impressed hundreds of people and directors who attended.

For me, it was hard to be satisfied, knowing this wasn't a full HD projector, but overall, the images looked as good as any cinemaplex in the state. But standing on stage, I measured a pixel at almost 5mm wide! From 40' away, it looked just fine. We barely made SMPTE 14 ft lamberts brightness though, but in a darkened theater, it was adequate.

Despite the shortcomings, and also that of the rented PA, a pair of TurboSound speakers and a Dynamate 600 powered mixer, which, thankfully, had an EQ which I used to advantage to reduce the boominess of the live space and increase clarity, we received numerous compliments on the presentation quality. Of course, in my head I kept thinking, "if only these people could have seen these films at the Bass Pig's Lair!" But nevertheless, to the average movie-goer, the 720P limit of the projector on a 20+ foot screen was just fine.


As a side note, I was reading on the RedUser forum that even the highest resolution 35mm film, when projected, has a maximum resolution that compares with 1280x720, so that tends to bear this out with what I observed at the Film Festival.

Still, next year I'm going to take a more active role in the next festival and push for a full HD projector and maybe a Christie CP2000, with 30,000 lumens, plus a better sound system.

 

[BMXTRIX]

Resolution is behind color accuracy and contrast for what makes an image look good, but it most definitely does matter.

One of the biggest issues you can run into is that a business class projector often does not deal with inter-pixel gap very well at all and you end up with a serious screen door effect. To fix that, you just move the audience back further. Which is basically what you have done.

I've got a local Lie-max theater near me which uses digital and I can tell you that as good as the image is, the reality of a 2K projector on a screen that large simply is not capable of producing a smooth filmlike image. From halfway up or beyond, the image is good, but any closer and you have very visible SDE. The image is still better than the typical 35mm print, but not nearly what the 70mm IMAX prints look like in a true IMAX facility.

What is amazing is just how far we have come in the last ten years really. Ten years ago, a fixed resolution projector would be tens of thousands of dollars for mediocre quality, so the rule was to go with 500 lumens of CRT projection technology and then stack those projectors to get the light output you needed to fill a larger screen. At $25,000 a projector, a typical large setup could easily cost a quarter million dollars or more. I remember installing Faroudja line doublers and quadruplers ten years ago and those video processors cost over $20,000 a pop!

Now, we have far more advanced video processing built into $300 LCD displays. Digital projectors hitting 5,000+ lumens are available for under $10K, and 1080p projectors available for $1,000.

The differences between a cheap projector and a quality projector are diminishing regularly. This isn't at all a bad thing, and hopefully the PC industry and the projector industry will follow the plasma/lcd industry and all settle on 1080p as the defacto resolution for everything of any quality. This will mean that we will finally get multitudes of 1080p options at every price point that truly blow away what we have now overall, especially for the brighter models which really are lacking at this time.

My one bone to pick on what you wrote is minor, but a good 35mm print will typically be beyond 1080p in resolution. Well used 35mm prints are not going to match up, and typical mass production runs of 35mm film don't match up, but the good ones and the masters will often exceed what 1080p is even capable of delivering. While most won't get that benefit, and film has some inherent issues as an analog format, the grain pattern of film is certainly capable of far more than 720p from everything that I have seen and heard. Now, maybe the audience doesn't get that difference, but moving closer than 1.5x screen width will certainly start to reveal those differences.

I'm glad you had a good experience, but I do hope you are able to get 1080p in there for the next event. Sony has some nice stuff, but perhaps you can swing a 10K lumen+ Digital Projection model. They are pretty astounding and being specified in a lot of college auditoriums these days.