Outdoor video projector - need recommendations

[Mike Blakesley]

Our local fairgrounds manager has asked me for help on picking out a projector to use at the fairgrounds. It will be for outdoor presentations. I have no idea what to recommend -- she has picked out the NEC NP-P554W which looks nice, but I'm worried about the "outdoor use" thing. I don't really know anything about this type of projector.... I've only seen them in use at convention meeting rooms. Does anyone have recommendations on this or something better? They are planning to use an FM transmitter for sound and are shooting for about a 25' picture.

[Frank Cox]

By outdoor presentation do they mean something that they wheel out and set up in the middle of the field? Or an fixed location shack-and-a-screen setup like a drive-in?

I suspect that whether it needs to be mobile or not would make a difference in what you can use.

While I've never actually seen one, I think some of the mobile cinema guys use something like an enclosed utility trailer with the projector mounted in it, then they just open up the back doors to shoot the picture onto the screen. I don't know how well some projectors would take to being shook up on the drives from here to there and across the cow pasture, so that also might be a consideration.

[Mike Blakesley]

It will be a wheel-out deal.

[Randy Stankey]

Although I can't make any recommendations on the projector or other equipment, I will say that I think it would be good if you could build the projector into a road box of some sort in order to protect it from the outdoor elements and from damage during transport.

The logistics would be better if you could move the system into place, open the box and set it up for the movie then pack it up and store it when the show is over.

When I worked at Mercyhurst, we occasionally did "run out" shows, either outdoors in the park or inside at other venues on campus. It was always a pain to get the projector, the player, the speakers, amps and other equipment packed up, moved and set up only to have to move it home and put it all away afterward. If we found that we were running out with a certain set of equipment, we would build road boxes out of plywood in the scene shop so that all we had to do was carry things as a unit. We would build plugs and jacks into the boxes if we needed them so that all we had to do was put things in place, open the boxes and hook up cables so that we could be ready to run.

I imagine that outdoor movies at a fairground would be a lot like the run out shows that we did at the college and I think that if you are going to use the same projector, player, amps and speakers in the same place and in the same configuration multiple times throughout the season it would be best if you could always have everything fixed up so that you could, for a lack of a better way to say it, be ready to "plug and play."

Building or buying road boxes would require time and expense and things might be heavier to move and carry but I think the benefits would outweigh the cost in your situation. Plus, I think the peace of mind, not having to worry about things getting damaged so easily would make it worthwhile, especially if you are going to buy all new equipment for this venture.

[Carsten Kurz]

The NEC NP-P554W is far from being a cinema projector, but sometimes brightness is all you can ask for.With 5500 lumens, it is just able to give a decent picture on a 25' screen.
1280*800 resolution - well...there are certainly other projectors better suited to movie projection.

[Mitchell Dvoskin]

What are they planning to use as a source? Blurays? If so, any high end consumer projector will probably do the job, although it is unlikely that they will be able to place the projector at one end of the field and the screen at the other.

Many years ago we had an outdoor movie party using 16mm. While I had seen few insects all summer, all of them came out for the show, and they all called for their bug friends to join them. Their preferred seating was on the projector lens, and they went for refreshments inside the projector. The point of this story is that while it was fairly easy to vacuum out the bugs and clean the 16mm projector, if bugs find their way into a video projector's light engine, and they will try, you will have a major amount of work to clean them all out and hope none of them melted themselves on the bulb or damaged the DLP or LCD panels. One needs to take into account how secure the innards of any projector they are buying if they are not securing it a trailer with a projection window.

[Ed Gordon]

When researching options to replace and old 1080i VP I found Projector Central to be very useful. Lot of articles and reviews.

Link: https://www.projectorcentral.com/home.cfm

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Any projector you use outdoors for sure needs air intake filters!!! You don't want to have to have the projector serviced every three showings because bugs got in the optical path. Talking to an authorized NEC dealer about that type of projector should yield some answers.

[Randy Stankey]

An enclosure would help keep bugs and dirt out.

If you build a road box you can design it to keep the projector covered and, maybe, even build in some screening for secondary filtration to, hopefully, keep bugs and dirt from even getting to the projector in the first place.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Last time I worked on a projection mapping project, we rented some mobile offices with big windows in them from a local rental company. Those had the size of half a shipping container and you could even order them with built-in air-conditioning. We put the projector-array behind the windows and while this glass might not be as perfect as that of a proper porthole and it's also not angled, it did the job pretty nicely.

Maybe this is also a solution for this particular undertaking. The nice thing about such an office container is that you can put all your technical equipment in there, including playback, sound mixing, etc. Also, the windows in there allow you to use it as sort-of a control booth too. Also, you don't need long, expensive cable runs towards your projectors either.

[Jim Cassedy]

These projectors were set up for an outdoor holiday light show at Chase Center Arena (San Francisco) last December. The pictures were taken during set up & system testing. I didn't work on this particular project so I don't know if these projector enclosures are commercially available, or were custom built. The show went on nightly, for almost a month, so these projectors ( BARCO "Boxer-4K30's" )had to spend alotta time in the somewhat cold/damp-ish & sometimes rainy San Francisco foggy winter evenings. The enclosures had several fans and internal heaters. I'm guessing they still had some sort of fogging problem on the ports, because I noticed a couple of days after I took these pix, vent hoses, about 2" diameter each, had been run from each projector enclosure down to a heat/air unit at the base of the towers.
(There were two towers like the one you see here & abt 14 projectors if I recall, set up for this show)
ChaseCntrChristie1.jpgChaseCntrChristie2.jpg

[Carsten Kurz]

My god! Who pays for that stuff?

[Jim Cassedy]

Well, The Chase Center Arena is primarily a sports arena & home of the Golden State Warriors ( US Basketball) team. But it's also concert & live performance venue. I'm guessing that NBA & The Warriors, plus the various concert promoters, Chase Bank, and possibly even The CIty of San Francisco, all must have 'chipped in' or perhaps its built in to the rental fees for the venue. But yes, there's a lot of expensive hardware on those towers- List price on just one of those Barco's is about US$100k, I think, and you could still probably buy a small house in some rural parts of the US for whatever one of those projector enclosures must cost!

[Marcel Birgelen]

Looks like a hell to maintain.

Putting those powerful projectors into boxes gets you in all kinds of troubles. Condensation is a problem, but also simply rain building up on the port windows. I know that Disney actually installed something like windscreen wipers on some of their boxes they use for their projection shows to combat the problem.

That's why we went with office containers. Granted, it depends on the shape of the building you need to cover if you can get away with it. In this case, the surface will be just a screen, so I guess a well-placed office container you can rent for a few bucks will probably do just fine. Some of them can even be stacked, complete with stair-modules, so if you need higher grounds, you stack two of those on top of each other.