First time doing projections, have a couple questions

[Thetechmanmac]

My high school is using projection this year for the first time, in our production of 9 to 5 the musical. I have experience with projectors, but not in a theatrical setting. We don't have a super fancy projector, just a basic Epson home theater projector. It does the job, and it is plenty bright for our stage.

I figured we would use Qlab for video playback. I use Qlab all the time for audio, but have never used it for video. I was planning on doing the video license rental this week, since it's our production week. Should I go ahead and update to Qlab 4 (on Qlab 3 now) or just stick with Qlab3? How difficult is it to set up a basic video surface?

The other dilemma we have is getting video signal to the projector. Right now our 50ft VGA cable reaches our SR tech desk. Unfortunately our booth is another 200ft in cabling away. I thought about buying HDbaseT extenders, but they are a little pricy. My idea so far was this: Putting one mac at the SR tech desk that is actually running Qlab, and remote in (screen share over network) to that mac from another Mac in the booth. The only foreseeable issues I could see with this setup are lag (which in test was not very significant) and losing connection. Should we just bite the bullet and get HDbaseT extenders and cable?

 

[Wtw2545]

Get a 250 foot ethernet cable and use Qlab on the mac in the booth sending OSC commands to the Qlab computer on stage

 

[thatactorguy]

My high school is using projection this year for the first time, in our production of 9 to 5 the musical. I have experience with projectors, but not in a theatrical setting. We don't have a super fancy projector, just a basic Epson home theater projector. It does the job, and it is plenty bright for our stage.

Projections are a terrific way to enhance the production, but be aware that the stage lights WILL affect how well the image on the screen is visible. Your projector might be plenty bright when it's the only thing on, but that'll change once you have a few thousand watts of light hitting near the screen. It should go without saying that one can't aim lights right on the screen (at least not when projections are running), but anything close to the area will still have an effect. You'll pretty well have to design the lighting around the projection screen, unless your screen is high enough that the light won't go near it. I thought I had an example from our production of Rent a couple of years ago, but I don't. Ack.

On a related note, it's always just SO lovely when you're nearly finished with the hang & focus, then the director drops on you the minor detail that oh by the way, he's using projections in the show, it's three days before tech, your own schedule is already super tight, the area in which the theatre is located gets locked at 10:00pm, and your alarm goes off at 6:00 the next morning so you can deliver mail 20 miles away...

That happens to everybody on here, right?

 

[ruinexplorer]

HDBaseT is not the only extender available. Since you said that you are going with a VGA signal anyway, you can also use other Cat-5 baluns for extending that will likely be considerably cheaper. One thing to note, with that distance, look for a balun that has skew correction. If you don't, then the colors will likely separate as they arrive at different times. This can be corrected by an additional skew corrector, but then you are just adding to the cost. If you have the budget to buy an extender, you will probably find use for it on future productions. If budget is tight and you have the second computer, that may be your best option.

I second the idea that you may be surprised at how washed out your image becomes in short order when the projector is subject to stage lighting. I assume that you plan on projecting on your cyc which is ideal for light, but can add challenge to your projector.

 

[Tamas Nagy]

I'm second on using OSC and remote control QLab - so move your computer as close as possible to the stage and remote control it over the network by OSC. The QLab guys have a pretty nice remote app, check it out.

 

[TNasty]

I second ruinexplorer's Balun suggestion. We were going to use some to do a triple-wide projection, but wound up not doing it, since the set designer waited until the last moment to make a rather crummy mount, along with not knowing how to mount it right from the batten.

If your projector has one, try using DVI or HDMI. You can find some decent baluns for cheap for that, and you get the perk of the "It does/doesn't work, no distortion" effect from digital.