Balcony rails and falls

[TheaterEd]

Here's a just opened - first audience entering - high school with 26" rail - a little thicker than minimum but designers wanted wood.

Yeah, while interesting to look at, that projector and mount are basically the opposite of anything I would want in my space. I prefer to hide my tech and let the audience try to figure out how I did it.

If you find any falls in theaters I would definitely be interested in the circumstances. Slight Tangent, anyone have a database of falls into the orchestra pit? I tend to google search the topic once or twice a year, but if someone kept that record it would certainly save me some time.

 

[BillConnerFASTC]

Well, at least the projector is likely only used for assemblies, not performing arts.

I'm not to concerned about hiding tech. Trying to shove lights into hiding is almost always restricting. Haven't tried to hide a speaker cluster or line array in a long time. And often have audience seated behind in house mix.

I follow pit falls - front of stage and traps included - lsoa - but no database. There were the fires I researched in NFPA database - 26 fires over 5 years reported, and fire service injured in 5 of them from falling off stage.

 

[Brad.O]

The PJ/lift is pretty atrocious if you ask me, even if it was black. For the amount of money invested in that PJ lift, the venue could have sourced a proper projector with interchangeable lenses that would support a throw from a concealed location - at worst, install into the underside of the balcony with a small window.

 

[MNicolai]

The PJ/lift is pretty atrocious if you ask me, even if it was black. For the amount of money invested in that PJ lift, the venue could have sourced a proper projector with interchangeable lenses that would support a throw from a concealed location - at worst, install into the underside of the balcony with a small window.

Yeah. Projector lifts are almost always a bad, expensive decision. Did a university classroom building a few years back where they insisted that every classroom have a lift so they could prevent theft. Cost of installing the lifts was more than the projectors and they could've had every projector in the building stolen, replaced, and reinstalled twice for the same price.

Keystoning is also not one of my favorite things to do, especially on big projectors. You're paying $15-20k for a projector and throwing 20% of your lumens off the sides of the screen as video black.

Sometimes noise is an issue for balcony mounted projectors, but laser projectors have brought noise levels down and you can build a conditioned enclosure into the balcony face if that is a critical concern for the venue.

 

[Jay Ashworth]

Wait: they keystone digitally?

I was pretty sure my WM-5500 (and the Epson 150X's I rented last month) did it by servoing a mirror...

 

[MNicolai]

Wait: they keystone digitally?

I was pretty sure my WM-5500 (and the Epson 150X's I rented last month) did it by servoing a mirror...

Yes, most projectors implement Keystone digitally where it squeezes and contorts the image before broadcasts it out of the light engine. That's why it's always best to locate projectors so you can hit your target within the range of your optical Lens Shift instead of keystoning to hit your target. This is more important for text/spreadsheets/presentations because your eye can spot when pixel sizes vary across the image and content unexpectedly jumps between rows and columns of pixels to resolve at the correct area of the screen.

The exception is when you're working with projection mapping or texture-heavy graphics because the distortion will be harder to discern with that kind of content.