24P for Investor Screening

S

stevesherrick

Well-known member
I have a project that will be screened for investors in a small theatre with a 10' screen. The theatre will be using a Runco projector. I'm wondering what would be the best way to master for this kind of presentation? I'm skeptical about DVD, as our initial tests were not that impressive. The project was shot with a DVX100 in the 24P advanced mode with an anamorphic adaptor on it. It has been edited in a 23.98 timeline, and we would like to keep it at that rate and in progressive mode the whole way through. There is room in the budget to get a Kona 2 card or a Black Magic card. One thought I had was to possibly run directly from FCP timeline via the Kona 2 right into the projector. But I will welcome any suggestions on achieving the best results. The client needs to have the best quality he can get out of this DV material.

Thanks,
Steve
 
IMHO you should just just encode a progrssive 24p DVD as next option. i dont think they will likely notice a real difference between a nicely encoded DVD and playback off the timeline. and the DVD isnt as likely to crash and screw stuff up for you.
 
They did say that the projector we'll be using has a special processor that can put out quite a bit of quality. So they didn't think DVD would be a problem either. I use Bitvise as my MPEG2 encoder. We did an initial test with no real color correction and displayed it on a 50" Plasma screen and it looked very grainy and noisy with the occasional MPEG2 artifact. I got a little nervous when I thought about what it might look like on a 10' screen. The good news is that we can probably do as many tests as we'd like before hand so I can fine tune it to try to get the best quality out of it.

We'll be using a multiformat broadcast monitor for color correction and I'm researching which cards will allow us to send out a 24P signal to the monitor. We want to avoid the addition of interlace on output. Any recommendations for the best card for doing this? It looks like both the Black Magic Extreme and the Kona 2 might possibly handle this, but I didn't see anything in their documentation that mentioned 480P specifically.

Thanks,
Steve
 
Regardless of what they tell you about the quality of their projection system, I'd definitely spend some time with it in advance to make sure it's up to your standards.

FWIW, I threw a (DVX) 24p DVD up on a wall using a Canon DLP projector awhile back (10'+) and it looked amazingly good. (The same guy's new Sony big screen sucked by comparison). I'm rarely impressed because most projection stinks but the contrast and clarity were there. IMO, lower end digital projection is usually the weak link.
 
That's the good news. I will have plenty of opportunity to do test screenings at this facility where they will be screening it. The Runco projector is supposedly a high end projector and based on the specs it does look impressive. It's DLP, lots of contrast, etc.

Just out of curiosity, what MPEG2 encoder did you use Preston?

Thanks,
Steve
 
I encoded right out of Premiere 1.5. I'm not positive but I think it uses the Sonic engine. I've always gotten good results. Canopus Procoder is also very good. Unfortunately, neither will do you much good as a Mac user.
 
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