I assume this does not include the cost of building a room behind the
screen, though I'm not sure how big of a room is required for
laser projectors.
Indeed. Nice thing about an
LED surface is you need hardly any structure behind it. I'm a fan of DesignLED's product for this, which is based on fully magnetic, lightweight tiles that are front serviceable. Not much really needed in terms of structure but you need some cable pathways coordinated and dropped into place during rough-in.
For the ~25x45 I was looking at, we needed ~25' upstage for projection. If you do custom mirrors to
bounce the images around, you can spend $150,000 and shave all of 3' off of your projection distance.
We looked at doing RP with Panasonic's ultra short
throw lenses ($$$) to cut that upstage depth down to 18', but the steep and graduated angle of incidence with the
screen would've created serious visual blooming.
Does it make sense for
LED screen to have a rp that can be flown in front of it when you want something more akin to a
sky drop look?
I would recommend doing a mock-up of this first but I think it could be interesting. Rose Brand's Translucent
PVC projection material might be good for this. It's high
gain which makes it susceptible to ambient light, but it pulls your
image through the
screen with vibrance like none other.
The trick would be getting the
screen close enough to the
LED wall that you maintain some resolution but not so close you prevent the
LED surface from getting enough airflow for cooling. Would maybe need 2 operating modes for the
LED wall, one with a lower brightness
level for direct view, and a 2nd higher brightness version for when the RP is place. Either way, you would never hit the max brightness of the
LED surface which would probably be in the in the neighborhood of 1200 nits. In a dark theater, 1200 nits will just about incinerate your retinas.
If you want to do a mock-up, give
Howard Witherspoon @ DesignLED a
call. He's out of Minneapolis area but comes down through WI and IL pretty regularly. He's got a good demo rig of different types of
LED walls he goes on the
road with. I would have a few yards of 2-3 flavors of RP materials on-hand you should be able to source through Rose Brand.
I think you'd still want
cyc lights though. An entry-level user can
throw faders and put looks together quickly with light fixtures in a way that just can't be done with video.