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February 2003|Getting into a real Hollywood studio is harder than getting into the Pentagon—I should know, I've been in both places. Hollywood's desire for secrecy comes not from the need to protect national secrets, but from the need to keep the "competition" in the dark—well, maybe that's the basis for Washington's tight-lipped policy too—and keep the other guys guessing. Anyway, the result is that no one wants to talk on the record about how they do things or what they use to do it with, even with something as innocuous as digital projectors used to preview studio-developed projects. But I got the scoop anyway. The Rat Pack's Stack
So what kinds of digital projectors are used in Hollywood? Well, at one large studio that favors smiling rodents—I can't say their name since they don't want to endorse anyone's products unless they get paid a lot—I saw just about every kind of projector from small conference room models to the latest in large-venue projectors. That's right, the happy rat people use projectors in their meetings with PowerPoint presentations just like everyone else does. They use their projectors to review and preview the progress of all their ongoing animation projects as well. Since the final result will be seen on the big screen, they need to see how it's going to look before hand. One animator told me that they constantly run digital progress reports on the big screen so most of their screening rooms are outfitted with cool projectors. So what kinds of projectors are at the happy rat palace? Like I said, all kinds—whatever is hot. I've seen just about every model there and, as you can imagine at a place where money flows like well water, they have the latest and greatest. They favor high resolution—the higher the better—and they like big, bright projectors. So, I imagine that when JVC started shipping their QXGA (the "Q" is for quad, or four times XGA's 1024x768 pixel resolution) LCD projector early this year that the rat people got one or two or more in place. I hope that they got a discount over the advertised price of $225,000, since that's major money, but who really cares—it's Hollywood. JVC's latest and greatest projector (the DLA-QX1G) lives up to its hype as being the highest-resolution projector in the world. It has a 7000-lumen, 1000:1 contrast ratio optical engine consisting of three of JVC's home-grown 1.3-inch diagonal reflective LCD panels, each with QXGA resolution—that's 2048x1536 pixels each for a three-panel total of about 9.4 million pixels. When I saw it operating I thought that the HD video images from JVC's QXGA projector really did appear to rival those of 35mm film (as they bragged in their press release) and that's why JVC developed it—for the electronic cinema market and for all the people working hard in Hollywood to make those movies. The best that the DLP electronic cinema crowd can do today is SXGA resolution—1280x1024 pixels on each panel and that's only a little more than 3.9 million pixels total. TI may think that SXGA is sufficient. But I have heard several Hollywood people complain about SXGA resolution, saying that SXGA does not give them the kind of resolution they want. So maybe JVC's 9.4 million pixels will—and according to JVC, their projector meets the SMPTE DC 28.8 study group and the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) members' 2000 lines of resolution standard for digital cinema. Why won't SXGA work well? For one thing, besides not even getting close to the SMPTE standards discussed earlier, SXGA resolution has an oddball aspect ratio; it's a 5:4 aspect instead of the well-accepted computer standard 4:3 aspect ratio. JVC tries to get around this in their smaller projectors by offering SXGA plus at 1365x1024 pixels, which can then make the standard 4:3 aspect ratio instead of the weird 5:4 ratio. But that 4:3 aspect doesn't help to provide clear 16:9 HD or DVD images or the even wider aspect ratio required by "real" movies which use a 2.35 aspect ratio image that is more than two times wider than it is tall. Only a few companies make projectors with native 16:9 aspect ratios (like Sanyo's PLV-70HT), probably because, as with SXGA, the 16:9 market is so very small compared to the "unwashed" masses of XGA business projectors. Even many of the companies who use SXGA resolution in electronic cinema don't use 16:9 chips to start with. They either use "anamorphic" projection lenses with standard aspect ratio chips—which means that the lens stretches and distorts the 5:4 or 4:3 image on the LCD or DLP to match the super-wide, 2.35 screen format—or they merely use a narrow portion of the available active area and throw the rest away. The anamorphic lens method results in bright but distorted pixels, while the throw out the extra-pixels method results in a dimmer, but more accurate on-screen image. Of course, if you start that process with JVC's bright QXGA projector, you can give up some light and pixels or both without it suffering in comparison to the other units. Hollywood people still use a lot of the latest and greatest SXGA projectors as well. I know because I've watched them shop for projectors and I've seen them in their screening rooms. They like the big, bright 5000-lumen-and-up SXGA units like NEC's "TriDigital" HD 10K digital cinema projectors as well as NEC's SX6000DC. Both of these projectors are built around three of TI's standard (not the much more expensive electronic cinema enhanced "Black" chips) 0.9-inch SXGA resolution DMD chips. The SX6000 uses a 1000-watt Xenon lamp to make about 5,000 lumens and the HD10K uses a 2000-watt lamp to make around 8,000 lumens. The base prices for these units are $79K and $125K respectively—at most, only about half of the big JVC's ultimate price—but NEC's TriDigital circuits work hard to make up for their lack of pixels.
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