Projection for Outdoor Cinema

[SamDram]

Hi all,

 

The school I work for are putting on a 'Drive-In' Cinema type thing. I have only ever done back-projection using the projectors we have in school, all of which are pretty small and have zoomable lenses.

 

All of the larger projectors in Stage Electrics hire stock seem to have interchangeable lenses with fixed ratios and zooms. I have no idea which one to go for and which projector will be best suited for the job. The screen size will be 16ft x 9ft (16:9) and as it's outside, there isn't really any restriction on where the projector is placed.

 

It will be an evening screening, but at the start of July, so it will still be pretty light outside.

 

Has anybody got any experience on projecting onto large screens outside?

 

Many thanks,

 

Sam

[top-cat]

Rather than just browsing their website, why not ring them and ask? They employ people with events experience for this very reason. They will help you choose a projector well suited for the job, and guide you to the correct lens.

 

 

In other considerations, I assume that you have plans for the other obstacles you'll need to cross, such as outdoor power, rain protection for the projector, and any wind-loading issues for the projection screen and any set?

[TonyMitchell]

Irrespective of projector brightness, if you are doing this outside, you will need to fully blackout everything around the screen and a few metres in front of the screen, or create a blackout tunnel. Otherwise, daylight will always win.

 

You may be better taking the LED route, see http://www.big-tv.co.uk/

[top-cat]

Sorry but I am yet to come across an LED screen system that a school can afford to hire. Especially since they will always require technicians to come and set them up and take them down, and usually a reasonably heavyweight structure to support them either freestanding or suspended.

[kerry davies]

There are plenty of reasonably priced screencos out there now with towable, simple to use screens available. Deals can be had. Try Big TV and Bay TV among many others.

 

The hassles of a July screening using dry-hire would persuade me to leave it to the experts and Googley outdoor screening hire which throws up any number of professional film screening outfits at all sorts of level. In early July sunset is around 21:30 with "lighting up time" around 22:00 so ambient light will be a problem for projection.

 

Sound outdoors can be even more tricky especially with the modern trend of whispering actors, something that ruins many BBC filmed productions, like Jamaica Inn.

 

E2A, our local film society could do it, partly because I helped set them up with grants for pro kit, have you looked around your equivalent of "Flicks In The Sticks"? The Hazlitt has a society and they may know the village halls posse?

[jason5d]

We do this quite a bit.

 

First of all what time of day do you wish to start the display?

anything b4 10pm in July is going to very difficult to compete with the sun so forget it!

 

 

2nd. licensing: either free or not you must have a license to show the film publicly (unless you are showing your own material)

 

3rd. the screen and projector need support and protection from wind and rain, we use scaff

 

4th. Audio. we use 5 small speaker stacks and 2 big subs with our THX decoder and blue ray player. If you are drive-in

do you plan to port the sound to car radios? If so you need a transmitter.

 

We use a 15,000 lumen xga projector with a 2:1 lens on a 16ft wide screen for this kind of thing on a budget,

otherwise it's a 20K HD projector.

 

There's a lots to think about, if you need we can do it for you at a cost

 

LED is expensive, we do a 12ft for £1000 so maybe not

[top-cat]

There are plenty of reasonably priced screencos out there now with towable, simple to use screens available. Deals can be had. Try Big TV and Bay TV among many others.

 

Yes they are reasonable with deals to be had, sure. They're reasonable considering what the product is. But it's an expensive product to buy, they have to pay for techs, they have to pay for trucking. It's prime season so demand will be higher. It is absolutely unarguable even by your standards that a 15k projector with lens and a 16:9 rear projection screen will be remarkably cheaper, and easier to transport / set up by a school technician, than a lardy great LED screen. That's just the way things are at the moment.

[AHYoung]

Having more than a little experience in this id say its going to be almost impossible to see any projection much before 9,30 - 10pm in early july. Ive done it a few times and we did a film showing in midsummer which ran from 9 - 10.45 . I had pointed out the impossibility of it all, and in the end we used a hd 15k onto a 12' screen at the rear of an open fronted marquee which shieded the screen from the sun at the start, even then it was just about visible at the start and acceptable by around 10pm. ive done many open air projection events and basically it wont work if its not dark, it might work a bit if its twilight but who wants to go to a film where you cant make out the first half. Either dont bother or do it late enough for it to work.

 

Your other problem will be dealing with the fact that even a relatively small screen is going to be a massive sail, the easy thing is to project onto a white wall , if thats not possible hang the screen against a wall or get a luton van or truck and attach it to that. dont bother with rear projection with a blackout tunnel- id think the practicalities of that through in the open air...

 

Hers a simple test. Your 2500 lumen classroom unit @ 2.m across is brighter than jasons 15k @ 5m across. take your unit and do some testing, if you cant see it clearly, even if you triple stack 20ks, its not going to be much better.

[dbuckley]

I'm going to echo a point that Jason made: licencing.

 

And if you are planning to show a modern movie (ie one that is close to its release date) you may need specialised equipment to cope with the studio requirements for copy protection, a DCP compatible projection system. That will up the ante significantly.

[SamDram]

Thanks for all you responses. Audio, licencing and anchorage is all sorted, it's literally just projector choice I'm struggling with. We do have a couple of 'indoor' backup scenarios, which I may need to fall back on because of the sunlight.

 

We have a farm on-site which has a large empty barn. I may utilise that for the screen, then chuck the audience on hay bales instead. It's not exactly 1950s Drive-In (we are screening Grease...) but at least it's something!

 

 

 

 

 

[smalljoshua]

We have a farm on-site which has a large empty barn.

Does that barn have a large door which the screen could be hung on? Back projecting onto that from inside the barn (assuming it can be blacked out well) may improve your chances of it working.

 

You'll still need a pretty large projector but at least you've got your blackout tunnel pre-built!

 

Josh

[AHYoung]

can I say again that sunlight and projection dont mix. irrespective of what you do it wont work, by all means waste time trying, but before you do take a parcan or similarly high powered light outside during the day {or evening} and turn it on, chances are you can see its on, but it wont do much.then think about projection again....

 

 

We own numerous very large projectors and id normally expect to lineup a 20k onto a 40' +screen with all the workers , houselights and showlights all on ie a very brightly lit hall - no problem at all even when the lampies got dozens of open white sharpies going. however I did a job earlier this year projecting with a 20k under a motorway bridge. the bridge was low as it was for pedestians only and effectively a reasonably long tunnel so no direct light sunlight came anywhere near the projection, but an image 2.5m across was only just visible enough, thats in a completely shaded "dark" spot with a small image using the brightest projectors we have, indeed the same ones we project onto skyscrapers with at night. So if you need to show video before sunset, you need LED, its horrible and not at all cinematic, but you will see it...

[jonny_av]

dbuckley, your point about DCP is interesting. I've worked with many DCP servers in many different venues and used to create DCPs for a film school so that they could be screened at international festivals.

 

I'm really interested in hiring DCP servers like a Doremi DCP 2000 or similar for various events, but have never had any luck finding a company that specialise in that sort of thing. Do you know of any? Given the cost of most servers, I've always been very keen to see what the hire prices are!

[Brian]

...before you do take a parcan or similarly high powered light outside during the day {or evening} and turn it on, chances are you can see its on, but it wont do much.then think about projection again....

Somewhere on here is a post I made a few years ago where I calculate the amount of artificial light you need to overcome the sun.

[dbuckley]

I'm really interested in hiring DCP servers like a Doremi DCP 2000 or similar for various events, but have never had any luck finding a company that specialise in that sort of thing. Do you know of any?

 

Short answer: no, but I do know a better place to ask this sort of question.

 

Longer answer: to be DCP compliant (ie to be able to show a DCP movie) requires not just a DCP compliant server, but an entire DCP compliant chain all the way to the projector too. The difficult bit in all this is the encryption and digital rights management pieces. You may well be producing DCPs that do not require keys to unlock, but a DCP server will refuse to output that content unless the path all the way is secure.

 

In a typical DCP setup, there is the media server, which is basically just a disk storage system, nothing terribly clever about this component, usually a Linux server under the covers. It stores DCP files, which is the actual movie. Servers usually has show scheduling software on them as well, which tells the server and the other elements (projector, curtains, house lights etc) what to do when.

 

Also usually housed in the server is a thing called an IMB, an Integrated Media Block. This highly secure module (if tampered with it will self-destruct!) takes the data feed of the DCP file from the disk, uses keys supplied (usually by email) that are specific to the projector, and are locked by start and end date and time, and decrypts the DCP file. It then re-encrypts the feed, which then pops out of the IMB to the projector. The projector then decrypts this feed and shos the image. If any of the stuff is tampered with then it has a sense of humour failure, and refuses to play ball, until a service engineer comes along, and, I kid you not, performs a marriage ceremony to assert that the data paths are clean and untampered.

 

This is why I mentioned modern content; the distributors for a modern movie will insist on DCP, and DCP is hard and more expensive than a big Barco and a bluray player!