Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Video Projection off of a Laptop?

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Posted by Ian Price (Member # 14) on 09-08-2006, 03:58 PM:

Problem: Create a highly portable, video presentation rig that would be convenient to carry on an airplane.

I thought that it might work to load all videos on a Mac laptop, use the DVI out to a good, yet portable video projector. Then the presenter could carry DVDs as backup.

Questions:
Is is stable?
Is the quality as good as Beta SP?
Is the sound out of a laptop good?
What computer program would you recommend?
Could you program multiple videos to run a seamless presentation?

What I would love is if the laptop ran as two screens where the laptop screen was like a preview monitor and what went to the projector was just the program, without cursors or menus and the like.

Posted by Paul Mayer (Member # 355) on 09-08-2006, 11:08 PM:

We do something like that for our weekly anime club screenings at CCSN. The students bring in their own Wintel laptops and connect to the meeting room projector and sound system. Sound seems good enough - just stereo through a mini plug, though one of these days we'll go the full digital 5.1 route. Picture via the VGA connection looks pretty good.

Most of what the club looks at these days are fansubbed P2P downloads via BitTorrent or some such, using the Divx player with all the plugins. Not much comes from DVD, but when it does we use PowerDVD for the player. These laptops are pretty stable - never have had any issues with unstable playback.

BTW the university has been replacing and upgrading all of their classroom projectors. A friend just scored on a Sharp 3LCD model for the grand total of $30. It's an older 800x600 machine but works great for DVD and Gamecube projection in his living room. All it needed was a good LCD panel cleaning, which I administered to it the other night. I've asked him to snag another one for me - for anime club and JACL movie night use.

Posted by Andrew Peter Chobaniuk (Member # 3886) on 09-12-2006, 07:25 AM:

provided youre using avi files you can use winamp to create a seamless presentation, you'll never see cursors or the like if you have your laptop set up to extend the desktop and the winamp video window dragged onto the 2nd screen (projector) the set to full screen

i use my laptop in my room as my dvd player and have it connected to my tv thru s-video (basically the same as connecting to a projector)

if your running dvds your out of luck for the seamless part (u gotta switch discs eh)

InterVideo WinDVD 7 is great for my dvd playing needs (watching fresh price season 3 full screen as i type on the same computer)

Posted by Jamie Glossop (Member # 2180) on 09-12-2006, 08:57 AM:

I used my laptop on my projector all the time, Just because it was small and lightweight to move when needed.

Anime movies are great to watch in big screen including manga and henti,

Mine was very stable, No problems whatsoever, Only once it crashed due to a windows fault,

If its just pictures your wanting to show why not try

Best Free One
http://www.irfanview.com/
I use this program, It has a slide show feature

Best Paid One
http://www.acdsee.com/

You could always try Power dvd which i use http://www.cyberlink.com/multi/products/main_1_ENU.html

Hope this helps [Smile]

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 09-13-2006, 06:38 AM:

quote: Ian Price
Is the quality as good as Beta SP?

Not if the source is a bogstandard DVD - even relatively high bitrates by DVD standard (e.g. 8-9mbps) don't match the resolution of SP. If you have a video capture card on another PC or Mac, you can capture footage from a Beta SP source through a component or s-video input. You can then render out MPEG-2 at a significantly higher bitrate than DVD supports (or DVCAM), say, something like 20mbps, and port the file across to the laptop using an Ethernet crossover cable or WLAN. Things to watch out for:

1. You'll need a decent capture card in the PC. A £30 Pinnacle domestic capture card won't even begin to approach the resolution of SP.
2. You'll need enough HDD space in the laptop. The bitrates you'll need are in the region of 10-12gb per hour of footage.
3. You'll need a decent graphics card in the laptop.
4. The transfer rate of data from the HDD must be fast enough to play the video without pauses, stutters etc.

quote: Ian Price
Is the sound out of a laptop good?

Depends on the sound card in the laptop. You can get higher end external USB ones if the built-in one isn't up to it.