DIGITAL PROJECTION FROM COMPUTER FOR YOUR FILM FESTIVAL Last Updated 2/18/2013 Courtesy of the Faux Film Festival ( www.fauxfilm.com ) Please do not distribute this document – instead link to www.fauxfilm.com/tips Table of Contents I. OVERVIEW ............................................................................................................................ 2 II. HARDWARE .......................................................................................................................... 4 Computer requirements:.............................................................................................................. 5 What about a laptop? .................................................................................................................. 6 What about a Video Appliance? ................................................................................................. 7 Hey, I’m a Mac, you’re a PC! ..................................................................................................... 7 YOUR COMPLETE FESTIVAL KIT: ...................................................................................... 8 USING A SEPARATE MONITOR............................................................................................ 9 III. SOFTWARE ........................................................................................................................ 9 OPERATING SYSTEM ............................................................................................................. 9 APPLICATION SOFTWARE .................................................................................................. 10 PLAYER SOFTWARE ............................................................................................................ 11 CONTAINERS VS CODECS .................................................................................................. 12 CODECS ................................................................................................................................... 12 DVD VIDEO ............................................................................................................................ 13 MiniDV VIDEO........................................................................................................................ 14 HDV, HD, or DVCAM VIDEO ............................................................................................... 14 DEALING WITH APPLE FORMATS .................................................................................... 15 DVDROM ................................................................................................................................. 16 DEALING WITH SUBTITLES ............................................................................................... 17 REFORMATTING VIDEO ...................................................................................................... 18 SOUND VOLUME ................................................................................................................... 19 COLOR BARS AND BLACK ................................................................................................. 19 WRONG ASPECT RATIO ...................................................................................................... 20 IV. SETUP ............................................................................................................................... 20 HARD DRIVE SETUP ............................................................................................................. 20 PLAYLISTS ............................................................................................................................. 21 SPONSORSHIP LOOP & WORKFLOW ................................................................................ 22 ADJUSTING THE PROJECTOR ............................................................................................ 24 TESTING YOUR FILM PROGRAM ...................................................................................... 24 BACKUPS ................................................................................................................................ 25 IF DISASTER STRIKES .......................................................................................................... 26 CLOSING ................................................................................................................................. 28 SOFTWARE REFERENCE ..................................................................................................... 29 EDIT AND CONVERT ............................................................................................................ 29 CODECS ................................................................................................................................... 30 © Copyright 2006-2012 Mad Martian® Page 1 of 31 PLAYER SOFTWARE ............................................................................................................ 31 I. OVERVIEW DO I REALLY WANT TO DO THIS? PROS: 1. Don’t have to juggle DVDs live during the festival. 2. One click plays an entire film block. 3. No time loss between films – the next film plays automatically. 4. No bad DVDs crashing at the fest with no way of showing the film. 5. Computer DVD drives are much better than home DVD players at reading flakey home-made disks. 6. It doesn’t matter if DVDs are NTSC or PAL. 7. You can show HD video at near-HD quality without HD equipment. 8. Most videos automatically play in the correct aspect ratio. 9. Before the festival, you can test run the whole film program in your home theater exactly as it will be seen (except for the different projectors). 10. After the festival, you can use the computer as a media center in your home theater! CONS: 1. Requires a fast computer. 2. It is best to have a dedicated computer, not one you use for other things. This can be an expensive extra item. 3. The computer or software could crash, perhaps irrecoverably (unlikely if you have set things up properly). ASPECT RATIO ISSUES First off, never display a film in the wrong aspect ratio . It is not ok to leave the equipment in widescreen and show standard films “stretched”. It makes all the actors look fat and can ruin the film. This holds true even if you don’t project from computer. It is also not ok to crop off part of the image! Aspect ratio discussions can be very lengthy, so I will try to summarize the important stuff here. Computers use square pixels. Standard and widescreen DV video actually use the same number of pixels – they are just shaped differently. Standard DV video uses slightly off square pixels of .9 ratio and widescreen uses rectangular pixels of 1.2 ratio (the width of a single pixel is 1.2 times wider than it is tall). By changing the shape of the pixel, widescreen films can be shown without needing more digital data than standard films. © Copyright 2006-2012 Mad Martian® Page 2 of 31 Pixel aspect ratio is separate from image aspect ratio. Standard TV image aspect ratio is 4:3 (if the image was 4 inches wide, it would be 3 inches tall) while HD TV is 16:9. Your computer displays at a particular resolution, for example 1600x1200 square pixels. If you do the math (divide 4 by 3 and divide 1600 by 1200 to get the same result of 1.3333…) you will see that standard computer image aspect ratio is 4:3, the same as TV. Software you use to play video will interpolate your video to display at your computer’s resolution and it does an excellent job with no noticeable loss in quality. In fact since the output is digital, any quality loss caused by pixel interpolation is still better than signal loss caused by analog outputs from your DVD player. Basically an image composed of wide pixels is re-mapped to fit to square pixels without noticeably distorting the image. Here is the important thing to know about your projector: Is the native resolution truly wide (more horizontal pixels) or stretched wide (changes the aspect ratio to widescreen by stretching the pixels horizontally)? To figure this out, find the out the Native Resolution (sometimes listed as Maximum Resolution) of the projector. Divide the width by the height. If it comes out to 1.6 or higher, you have a true widescreen projector. If it comes out to 1.333 or smaller, you have a standard projector. Once you know this, you can make a decision: 1. The best option is to use a projector capable of displaying a widescreen computer image (made of more horizontal square pixels, not stretched pixels). Player software will adjust automatically and your image height, size, and focus will not need to be adjusted after the first setup. This is the best solution if you have the equipment for it, but most older projectors do not support widescreen computer resolutions and indie theaters with older digital projectors are slow to replace them. If you are in the market to purchase a large-format digital projector (or one for your home theater for that matter), this feature is key and is standard on any true HD (720p or 1080p) projectors. One caveat of using a true wide projector is that some film makers encode their wide films as standard films with letterboxing. You will need to get them to send you a properly encoded disc or wide format data file. 2. Use the standard projector in standard mode (do not stretch the pixels). This will leave the far left and right of the screen unused. When you display a widescreen image, it will take up the same standard width