Mike Cruser, Southbrook Church
Page 1 of 5 >>
Edgeblending, Matrix of Choices
Panoramic video backdrops are the hottest new visual effects for churches. Edge-blending techniques using video projectors are becoming affordable, and church creativity is blooming.
enlarge
Edge-blended displays relied solely on projectors with xenon lamps in the past. Today, image processors can accommodate less-expensive projectors, which typically use UHP lamps. (Mike Cruser, Southbrook Church)
Last fall, Southbrook Church in North Carolina was opening a new campus in Weddington, about 20 miles from Charlotte. Pastor Mike Cruser was busy: In addition to juggling the tasks that typically attend the launch of a new worship facility he was overseeing the integration of a 3x1 matrix of projectors. (He's both the worship and production pastor at Southbrook.) The end result would be a stunning super-wide visual backdrop for the new sanctuary, which seats about 1,250. The projected image would be processed and fed by a Vista Spyder unit and beamed through three Panasonic PT-D12000U projectors with onboard soft edge-blending capabilities.
Cruser had researched the video system himself, and now was collaborating directly with Vista Systems engineers and corresponding with Panasonic engineers in Japan. "We wanted to go with an integrator, but the price of the integrator was fairly expensive," he says. But with the pastor leading the integration, nothing would stop the Weddington campus of Southbrook Church from getting its ultra-widescreen projected image.
In the course of his do-it-himself foray into systems integration, Cruser has encountered most of the problems that still confront a church attempting to set up a matrix of projectors that's designed to display a singular image. For Southbrook's Weddington campus, all was certainly not for naught. Pastor Mike's efforts have resulted in a 70- by 20-foot image that's seamless---almost. "The only time we see a little bit of a problem is when there are really dark colors," he says. "Sometimes there's just a little variation that you'll see right on those blend lines. But for the most part you can't even tell."
Even for the most sophisticated soft edge-blended projection systems, variations in brightness are inevitable in areas of projector overlap that contain extreme black or extreme white imagery. Though it may always be slightly out of reach, how does a church go about striving toward edge-blended perfection?
Step by Step
The general steps toward devising a soft edge-blended projector matrix display are as follows. First, an appropriately proportioned image signal is repeated --- or "split" --- enough times to feed a certain number of projectors. A splitter---either outboard or integrated into a switcher or other image processor---handles this step.
Second, the image needs to be cut into pieces before its parts are assigned to each projector in the matrix. Some projectors contain the onboard processing power to perform this slicing and dicing --- really just "zooming into" a specific part of the unit --- but outboard units such at TV One's C2-1250 and others, can also do the job. You'll need a separate image processor, or an individual output on a processor with multiple outputs, for each projector. The image slice will need to include an area of overlap; this is the edge to be blended. For example, in a 2x2 projector matrix, the left-upper projector will display the left-upper quadrant of the original image, plus 10 to 20 percent extra on its right and bottom edges.
Page 1 of 5 next page >>
Trevor Boyer is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, New York. He likes to write professional A/V and video production stories (like this one) that can be reported via subway travel.
Post a Comment
ADD NEW COMMENT