Projectors

[BasharOfTheAges]

Having always been at the receiving end of convention submission instructions regarding format and whatnot, i've given very little thought to how a projector is actually set to correctly display various formats of video in the proper resolution and PAR. A question was posed to me regarding a set-up I display videos on yesterday - It boiled down to "where does the conversion take place and are we doing that correctly?" for a projector that outputs square pixels.

Is there a standard that projectors adhere to regarding processing and displaying 640x480 square pixels and 720x480 0.9PAR ones? If so, would it be related to the input methods (Composite vs VGA vs S-Video, etc)? Do they handle everything the same way? Is there internal processing going on? Is PAR ignored completely?

[BasharOfTheAges]

Nobody?

[post-it]

.. in Minnesota, we just use five 1280 X 720p DLP projectors and
a 99.7% Bleached-White Sand-Diamond screen mounted on a solid wooden doors
hung over our heads .. like they used in the Angelic Layers tournament field.

.. he said .. the screen crystals are smaller than the video pixels themselves which help sharpen the image.
( a guy from Radio Shack, who now works at Computer Micro Systems, set it up for us and explained "why"
this would be the "best picture possible" + how and where to set it up to repeat the great images over and
over again. ) I wish I could tell you more about it but; that stuff is all "Greek-to-me," I just know it looks awesome.

[[ wish I would have seen this question earlier, I could have taken some snap shots of it; hehe, we like it ^__^

.. as to the question of 1024 X 840 or smaller, the guy from Radio Shack told us not to use that old-stuff!

[BasharOfTheAges]

right... well the question came up about whether or not there would be a difference between playing a DVD from a stand-alone player connected to the projector through composite cables and playing a DVD from a computer's DVD player with software through VGA. I don't have the hardware on hand, so I just told the person that did to try it out and report the findings.

[post-it]

... the question came up about ...
"would there be a difference between
a) playing a DVD from a stand-alone player
connected to the projector through composite cables

b) playing a DVD from a computer's DVD player
with software through VGA.

report the findings."

The projectors we use perfer HDMA cables and seem to work
best when coming directly from the BlueRay DVD player itself.

T_T .. this is not helpful to AV-Jockies and multi-screen displays
of different "flowing" content ( like a LIVE show with awards & such! )

.. Our solution, having unlimited time to build and play with things; gave
use a useful purpose for all those slow AMD 5600+ motherboards we had from
last years show ... they are now our Video Routers and Squencers to HDMA Video Converters

the problems we had in the past were two-fold:
1) to play the Videos that people had made.
... this was fine .. if .. if they had encoded things themselves.
( care to take a guess at how many people accomplished that!?? )
.. we also ran into a problem with "loading delays" and editing
what we were showing became a bloody nightmare
2) the video cards became waaaaaaaaaaay to hot .. from driving too many displays
at one time.
( our solution of having a "multi-screen programmable splitter" blew-up
in our faces LITERALLY! not fun!!
We also had quite a fun time with another issue on the displays ...
it seems that "no one had ever made a fully-functional display controller fro AMVs"
for purposes of Live Video Demonstrations and Interactions thereof -- before!!

Our solutions have cost us a few pennies and are exclusive to our shows because of this
design and engineering. ( we are not letting our techno-geeks sell or demonstrate our thingys. )
.. its a nice way to occupy our time when being bored at work ( did I mention that we also
work at a local TV station right here in the twin cities??? that also gives us a little insight as to
how and why things work .. how to work them comes with practice, practice, and more practice. )

In Short: DVD Players take time to load, time to start and are almost impossible to mix and match ANYTHING with!!!
Computer driven projectors are the "cleanest way to do it" through "HDMA" cables which requires many many
other things to mix and blend the AMV's properly. Wiping, blending, swapping, rotating from one screen
to another, window-in-windowing, blah blah!! Solution: Computers and Projectors as Direct as possible.