The pieces in the lossless series were designed to be projected 1). We have shown the series on MiniDV, Digital Betacam, HDCAM, and MPEG-4 media and projected the work in a wide variety of venues. Generally we have found the quality of the image to be gated more by the projector than by the media. Never mind that HDCAM has 400% more resolution than MiniDV and Digital Betacam, we saw equal or superior image quality from the projector at the HFA (showing MiniDV) compared to every other media/venue combination.
We have entered a period of heterogenous media performance. This is driven by at least two factors:
- the growth of personal media and diversity of media-players
- corporate expansion of projector features in order to differentiate products
This is not the place to quantify these differences, but I must note that every one of the projected video pieces at the Sert gallery was prepared especially for the projector. Here's what we did:
- L3: Aspect ratio changed from 1.77×1 to 16×9 to prevent pillar-boxing 2). This in addition to expanding the image to 1080p which is a native format for the projector.
- L4: To prevent severe pillar-boxing, the metadata describing the image as 4×3 was changed to 16×9. This stretched the square pixels into rectangles (1.44:1) which were then resquared by the projector. It sounds dramatic, but this approach preserved the delicate vector lines quite well.
- L5: Is being shown on an older LCD projector which doesn't fully support the 480p signal coming out of the media tank. The image aligned flush left but pillar-boxed to the right. Also there was a greenish cast to the image (which should be greayscale, according to the source). New media was prepared (using After Effects) to fit into this box and remove the green cast.
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