Thomas Procyk's Adventures at
ShowEast 2002
Orlando, Florida, USA
Welcome to ShowEast! The first cool thing that caught my eye was the Magna-Tech display. They had rollers all along these metal beams stringing film all around their booth. Yes, the film was actually running. All the way until it got to...
...this projector. The film ran through the machine and was projected onto a mirror which bounced it off onto a little 10-inch screen (foreground). The effect was awesome, except there was the expected flicker and about 60fl of light on the screen!
Next stop was the Neumade booth where the nice gentleman showed me all the cool new automations and port windows. You can see one port window on top of the rack, and another one below.
This is Neumade's latest automation. It can do all kinds of things, including control any projector in the complex from any other unit. According to the front panel, it also has touch screen control.
Here's the Kinoton America booth. The wonderful Larry Shaw was busy while I took this picture, which is why he's not in it. This is one of their PK-series projectors. You could barely hear the thing running!
And here's John Gordon standing proudly before the booth of QSC, who makes some of the best amps in the industry.
Surprise! Look who else was hanging around QSC at the time: It's John Pytlak and Ian Price. John had a screening to go to, so Ian and I explored the rest of the trade show.
Choose your weapon. Here is the Superior Quartz booth and their array of xenon bulbs, ranging from 250 to 15,000 watts. Hmm... I wonder...
Yep! It's heavy! Here is yours truly holding a 15,000 watt xenon bulb. The expression on my face depicts the thoughts of the plethora of consequences that would occur if I dropped the thing, including being beaten by Dennis Losco.
Ian decided to take the bulb off my hands, so here he is holding the SAME BULB! They weren't joking when they said he was a big guy. You can see the MegaSystems display behind him.
The display for the now-defunct MegaSystems. According to Ian, they were running the same film they always have, and it looked pristine. I snapped the picture right as the scene was changing.
What's this? An AW3? Nope... It's a Christie Miniwind, a smaller version of the popular platter. The thing looked darn cute, except probably when it comes time to build The Lord of the Rings or Gods & Generals.
Tired of that boring sloped-floor auditorium? Stadium Concepts can show you how to convert it into the crowd-pleasing, acoustical nightmare of Stadium Seating! This is a scale model showing how construction is done to give your theater(re) a face-lift.
And here's Oscar Neundorfer of Smart. When the day slows down and the crowds start to dwindle, Oscar likes to lure people into the Smart booth with that bowl of candy.
Then we moved on to the DTS room. Yes, DTS had their own room because they are cool like that. Here they had racks set up with each unit mounted both ways so you can see the front and the back. If I remember correctly, the projector mounted on the right side was for the DTS-CSS captioning system.
A shot of the various timcode readers they had on the table for 35mm and DTS-70. Hopefully, the latter will get more use in the future.
A bunch of Paramount people were posing for someone else's camera when I decided to take the opportunity and snap this picture. They became confused when they saw the flash from my camera and turned to my direction afterwards. The man on the right in the blue remained unphased.
Another picture of the Paramount set up. This is a prop from Star Trek: Nemesis.
An assortment of lenses from Schneider. Available in an array of different colors to match any booth decor.
A portable, 1kw Xenon, 35mm projector at the TVP-Miami booth. Not sure what brand it was, but it cost less than what I paid for my LCD projector four years ago. This would be perfect for a small home screening room.
This was the strangest projector at the show. Its makers claimed it can project images without the need of film running through it. Many people were curious and stopped to ask questions about it. I overheard things such as "The projector of the Future" and "Replace existing machines forever." The glaring problem being that it was in no way backwards-compatible with today's films. I wish these "Texas Instruments" people a lot of luck with that!
And finally, we end the tour with a picture of Brad Miller's favorite platter, the Strong-AP! I wonder if this is the same one that will face the Ian Challenge at ShoWest.
Special thanks to Thomas Procyk for the pics.