Low end video curtains

Ron Kimball

Senior
Mar 5, 2011
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NE CT
I've been told the 9cm pitch ones aren't good for much but am looking at the 4.5cm pitch ones that sell for around $2.5K for a 2x3 meter. Have any of youse guys checked them out? Even at that pitch they are only ~65x45 pixels. You rarely see an example of a photo on one LOL. Obviously for smaller rooms where space and budget don't allow for better. Useful or crappy/tacky?
 
Rule of thumb for "fusion distance" (the point at which the gap between adjacent pixels disappears) is 1000x the pixel pitch. So those 45mm pixel pitch units will look pixelated out to ~45m, or roughly the length of a medium-sized hotel ballroom. Might be interesting as an effect, but I'd be hard pressed to call it a screen.
 
Sorry to bump an old thread, just noticed this. Ron, you may find it useful. Have done some shows with these and so long as you approach it for what it is it can be pretty cool as an effect. You just have to take the time to find content to display that suits it. Lots of canned motion graphics etc can work well.

An alternative (for an indoor venue) would be to rear project with several ultra short throw projectors and something like the Matrox TripleHead2Go or similar. This will give you much higher resolution. I used to have a DIY setup like this with a custom screen that was 28' wide by 8' high, and it looked pretty decent considering how inexpensive it was.

Here's a really old youtube clip (10 years ago) of this in action (with a smaller version of that screen) and some cheap 1500 lumen $300 projectors. Yes, the footage sucks (a kid's ancient cell phone lol). Total cost for this including the DIY screen was about $1500. Jump to about 1/2 way through the video.

You could obviously do MUCH better than this with modern gear, and a custom-sized pro screen would be far superior to my DIY screen, albeit at a higher cost. Regardless, you can do quite a bit without a huge investment, and stuff like this can really make a difference in the look of your show.
 
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