OT: Movie Theater Projector Questions

Flame Tools and Tech
1

Looking for people who have some knowledge of the projectors used in movie theaters. I have questions.

  1. Are they mostly of one or two brands? What’s the variety in the field?
  2. What sort of A/V signal to they take (HDMI)
  3. Can you stream a netflix show or PS5 game on one? Like just plug in a laptop and you’re good to go?
  4. Are there colorspace issues, like the colorspace for streaming is not as good or incompatible with whatever the projector expects?
2

I found this

3

basically, if I plug my laptop into one of these things, can I make a movie-quality video come out of the projector, and if not, how degraded is it?

4

  1. Barco or Christie is probably 95% of the market in the US

  2. This is called the ICMP. There are several generations. I think Barco is currently on ICMP-X.

  • 3G SDI + DVI
  • 3G SDI + HDMI 1.X maybe 4K. If 4K then it is 8bit
  • 3G SDI + HDMI 1.X 4K 10bit
  • 12G SDI + HDMI 2.X 4K 10bit High Frame Rate

  1. No internal apps, but via the SDI or HDMI you can plug in whatever you want. We have an AppleTV 4K plugged in the one of the HDMI inputs

  2. Projectors have deep settings. We have custom settings file for many different formats both SDI and HDMI. Including one for AppleTV 4K Flat and Scope. Colorspace is highly controllable.

You need to find out the Make/Model of Projector, model of ICMP, scope or flat, size and distance to screen, power rating of the lamp, how many hours on the lamp, what power the lamp is being driven out, the lamp focus, then there are all the colorimetry settings.

Yes, it can be done. Is the place with the projector willing or know how too?

5

Silly me . . . I got all excited when I read the topic. I thought we were going to talk about things like the Simplex E-7.

6

I looked it up for grins… Does that really cost $230k???

7

You also have laser or xenon projectors for bigger cinemas and can have LCD or LCoS projectors for smaller spaces. Not all calibration probes work accurately on all types either.

Oh, and you can talk screens as well because that comes into it as well.

But yes, you can plug your laptop into some projectors.

8

Over here in Europe Barco and Christie is everywhere. NEC also produce some but have not dealt with them myself

Most projectors also have or are sold with IMB (Integrated media block) which essentially is a server handling DCP playback, more inputs and theatre management. There’s usually no problem with having enough inputs but especially if you’re going trough the IMB then latency can be quite excessive.

For the calibration of DLP at least you mostly just run primary’s, feed it into it and it maths out the rest it self. For color critical work DLPs need to be calibrated quite often due to the bulb changing color over its life span.