iMovie and/or Final Cut X for Projection Design

[Green]

Hello! I am researching for a small theater looking to incorporate projection design into a production.

The projection screen is inside a large picture frame (with a rear projector).

Can iMovie and/or Final Cut X be used for designing projections? How do we make sure the projections are the right size to fit within the frame?

Thank you for any advice and information you are willing to share!

 

[ruinexplorer]

iMovie and Final Cut can definitely create content which can be used for your purpose. Have you created your frame to a standard aspect ratio such as 4:3 or 16:9? Does the native resolution of your projector match the aspect ratio of the screen? You will want to design to those criteria.

 

[metti]

Neither of those can be used for designing projections but either can be used for creating content (although iMovie to a rather limited degree). Without a projection designer or someone who is going to serve that role, no amount of content creation software will give you a cohesive, artistically appropriate design. That being said, the content creation software that is most commonly seen being used by professional projection designers and their editors/assistants is Adobe After Effects and Photoshop. Most also use some combination of Final Cut, Premiere, Illustrator, Cinema 4D, Maya, and 3DS Max to a generally lesser degree. Ultimately, you have to determine what the design is going to be and what content will best serve the storytelling needs of the show you are doing an that will lead to the right software. That might be FCX or Photoshop or it might be a piece of paper and a marker. @ruinexplorer's comments about aspect ratio and native resolution are spot on.

 

[Joshualangman]

Yes, by all means get an actual projection designer. Doing projections well takes a tremendous amount of talent and skill, not to mention time and money.

Also worth noting: the software you use to create the content will not be the same as the software you use to play it in performance. The playback software is, if anything, MORE crucial to the quality of the presentation than the creation software. For playing videos, you will probably want something like QLab, which is cue-based, or Isadora, which is suitable for more interactive designs (where the video reacts in real-time to what the actors are doing etc).

But content creation and playback can be blurred together, and sometimes a significant part of the "designing" actually happens in QLab (or whatever). You may use Final Cut or After Effects to produce the raw materials, but they aren't woven together into a design until they end up in the playback software.

(On a more specific note, I just tried to use iMovie for the first time in years and was pretty appalled. It crashed about twenty times in ten minutes, losing work each time. The interface is impossible to figure out and rigidly inflexible. I couldn't make it do anything like what I wanted, and all I was trying to do was some simple edits. Stick with the pro tools.)

 

[Green]

Thank you so much. The frame is 16:9, and would involve a few projected images and maybe a short video or two on loop. Should HD images/footage be used, or do SD images work as well? ?

 

[ruinexplorer]

Here's what you are looking at. First off, you are looking to create the content that will be presented. I am assuming that your picture frame will be in landscape (normal) orientation and not portrait (turned 90 degrees to be taller than wide). When you are creating the content, you will generally want to fill the entire projected surface, thus sticking with the wide aspect images. This of course is part of the design process, how you ultimately want it to look. Do you want there to be blank parts of your screen if you have SD content? Do you want to strech or zoom your content so that it fills the screen? Do you want to layer your image so that the SD content is on top of a background which fills the rest of the screen instead of video black? Some of these decisions may be made by what your content is. If you have a widescreen TV that you are able to change the aspect ratio between SD and HD, then play some of your content on there and switch between the two to see how it looks.

As has been mentioned, it is often desirable to understand how you intend to display your content before creating it. You have one step done by knowing that you will be projecting HD onto a 16:9 surface. Do you know what the resolution of your projector is? It will be best if you send the native resolution to your projector. This way, the image will look more as you intended it to look as opposed to the projector needing to process the signal into something it can project. Do you know what your playback device will be? Since you are looking at Mac editing software, then you will likely want to look at Qlab. However, it will be best if you have this program on a machine dedicated to show use. This means that you will need to strip down unnecessary applications which can potentially slow it down. The nice thing about Qlab is that you can rent it for use during your presentation and not need to worry about it setting you back too much. You can also look at a free program called Video Projection Tools. It has its quirks, but I have used it in a pinch. It is made to run on either a Mac or PC. Of course, if you don't need any processing, you could play it back on something as simple as a DVD player (not recommended).

You will also need to consider how to get the signal from the source (your computer) to your projector as well as how you intend to control it. Will you have an operator or have it triggered by some other source, such as a lighting console?