Blending Projectors

[Tom Colburn]

Assuming initial hanging of hardware is pretty good, is there a best practice way to go about initial keystone adjustments? As in should you start with the projector keystone settings first, then move on to QLab warp settings, or skip the projector and move straight to the warp settings in QLab?

TIA

Tom

[Greg Leeper]

My preference is to d as much alignment as possible optically- ans soon ans you start digitally warping your introducing artifacts.   

This also minimizes seeing projected black.  

Ideally you don’t need to warp, so the blend looks as good as it can.  

I  keep digital warping isolated to one system.  If your geometry correcting in both the projector & qlab it’s easy to get confused re: what’s warping what.  

[Tom Colburn]

Thanks for the tips! I’ve got a pretty good blend, currently, but I’m only using the center third as my sets are covering the outer thirds and as you mentioned, I can see the projected black.

Once my run is done, I’ll be redoing the blend on the full screen and was wondering the best way to go about it. Starting with the projectors for the fit to the screen makes sense, then any warping in QLab to fine tune the blend.

Thanks again!

Tom

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[Greg Leeper]

Re: Projected Black - I can't think of a projector that doesn't have a perimeter, outside the content raster, of projected black.

If you really want it to go away in your blend, physically blocking the light at the lens, or a bit in front of it is the answer.

I've done this with tape, and with fabric like duvetyne one can fray the edge and get a nice gradient or feathering.

This technique can also mask, or improve how the blend overlap looks when gamma and other settings don't get it how you want it.

Photo from someone else's install at a museum attached-

[Andy Dolph]

IDK if the contrast ratio of a true RGB laser projector might be good enough to not have a visible "black" box - that's the only thing that seems likely - and wow are those expensive.

For a while there was a specialty projector called the Zoro (I think) that was made for planetariums and other simulation environments that if I remember right was an LCOS projector but that RGB image from the LCOS went through a single LCD panel that essentially acted as a pixel by pixel "gate" that created an incredible contrast ratio - but again - crazy expensive - and I haven't heard anything about them in probably 10 years.  (TBH I'm mentioning it here because I thought the tech was cool more than because I think the information would have any value).

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