Colour correction for rubbish projectors – Part 1

Hey – don’t all die of fright, but I’m posting a new post here again.

I won’t bore you with a detailed explanation, but suffice to say that a young family and a new job in a different city, house sale, purchase, rennovation etc. etc. meant that VLOBLIVE posts weren’t high enough up my priority list to surface for a long time.

Anyway – enough excuses –  how about a post, you all say…

Well I was finishing off a video for showing in a Church today and the church in question had a rather limited video projector – I think it’s around 2000 ANSI lumens and it doesn’t cope too well in strong sunlight.

I was thinking how to colour correct for this and thought I would note down my musings here.

This first post concentrates on preparation…

Converting Quicktime video files into WMV for PC playback

If you create video content on a Mac, but you need it to be played back on a PC at a live event, you may run into the situation where you are using a PC app that doesn’t play back .mov files (yes, it happens – especially if the app is built on the windows media player framework….like most PC song projection apps are!)

Here are a few options…

Playing back interlaced video on computers

If you are playing back video clips directly to a projector from a PC or Mac, and the clips are interlaced video, then you have probably seen the ‘jaggies’ effect where fast moving edges take on a comb effect, due to the two fields of the video capturing the motion at slightly different times. Here’s some suggestions for how to get rid of that distracting effect.

Tips for sending & receiving BIG media files electronically

With the size of media clips, graphics files and even powerpoint files growing larger all the time, transferring these files electronically is becoming more of a headache.

Here’s some suggestions for reducing the headache for you and your VLOBLIVE clients…

Making a ‘play-then-pause’ DVD in DVD Studio Pro

Here’s a quick ‘how-to’ provided by Buzz Miller (who got it from Nick Fox-Gieg ) on how to design a DVD in Apple’s DVD Studio Pro app that will play one clip then pause on black, then play the next clip and pause etc.
If you’re doing a VLOBLIVE event short-handed and need to know that there is NO WAY to play the wrong thing on the DVD, this is a good approach.
Thanks Buzz.

The VLOBLIVE toolbox – what to pack for a video gig?

What items would I always take in my toolbox to a VLOBLIVE gig? Read on to find out.

Mixed VGA and Video – what are the options?

Most VLOBLIVE events require both video sources – VCRs DVDs cameras etc. and also PC graphics sources. Somehow both of these types of signals have to end up at the projector. Here’s a quick lowdown of the main ways to do it and why you might choose each one…

Tips for preparing video for live playback

A lot of the info on this site relates to live camera work, but playing back video clips is a very common requirement for VLOBLIVE events, and there are quite a few things you can do to make this work better…

A note on S-Video connections

S-Video is a great thing for vloblive technicians – it gives you a lot of the benefit of component video in terms of quality, without increasing the cable count too much. The big downer of S-Video is that, invariably it requires connection with those horrible little miniDIN plugs. Not only are they hard to orient in a hurry, but the pins bend easily and they have no mechanical locking mechanism. Here’s one way around it…

What is the best kind of connector to use for video interconnect?

If you are using a whole mixture of equipment, chances are you have a mixture of BNC, phono and maybe even other connector types for your video interconnect. Which is best and why?…

formatting song words for use with IMAG

If you know in advance that you are planning to
overlay words on IMAG live video, then you can help yourself out by formatting
the words in a sensible way. …

Projector screen size – bigger is better, right?

Given the option you always want the BIGGEST screen
you can find for projecting onto…. or do you?…