Presnted an animation on projector. The quality was horrible.

[supaidaaman]

I recently presented a dvd i made of some animations created in after effects. It was shown at my schools theater/lecture hall with a projector (not sure what model...but its massive, and pretty new)

Anyway the quality was just horrible, most of the fine details were completely washed out and I was pretty angry. I had it formated ntsc 720x480 on the highest quality bit rate/settings offered by adobe prem. pro...The picture looked amazing and sharp on my 2 27+ inch TV's. (Waaay better than my 17" crt)

So here are the questions:

1. Is my schools projecter garbage? The screen the movie was projected on was about half the size of a movie theaters screen.

2. If im presenting movies(animations) on a huge screen...should i be formatting the picture differently onto a dvd. The raw rendered animations are 15gigs+, but no matter what i did, the dvd would always compress it down to 250 megs. (movie was about 3 min long) The tv quality was still amazing though...

any thoughts?

 

[YOyoYOhowsDAjello]

Do you have any specs on the projector at all? Do normal DVDs look good on it?

How was the DVD played? (on a DVD player connected directly to the projector etc.)

What kind of details were lost? Was the whole thing blurry / out of focus? Was it text that looked bad?

Do you know if it looks better when given a different source (like VGA from a computer)?

If you've seen the same projector look great with a different source like a computer, it might be some issues with getting 480i to play on it if it's higher res.
In general, 480i is pretty darn low for resolution, so if you were close to the screen it would just tend to look bad in general. I'm at about a 40 degree viewing angle playing DVDs on my projector and although it's playing back at 720p, I wouldn't want to go any higher than that with the quality of my source material.

 

[supaidaaman]

fine details of lines that were close (that were red colored) looked like one big mash of red. Lots of blur. Lots of blending of details and loss of color...also some grain and what almost seemed like artifacting. I think it was VGA...i did have it hooked up to a computer at one point, but the quality was about the same...maybe a tiny bit better.

 

[YOyoYOhowsDAjello]

Do you know anything about the resolution of the projector?

Maybe instead of a video DVD you could bring in a data DVD with it less compressed and at higher res to try to get better results if you can have a computer as source?

 

[supaidaaman]

the school computers can bearly play a 200mb video file without hickups...i doubt a 4gig raw video would fair very well..

 

[YOyoYOhowsDAjello]

Originally posted by: supaidaaman
the school computers can bearly play a 200mb video file without hickups...i doubt a 4gig raw video would fair very well..

Is there someone that works in IT there or something that is more familiar with the particular system? In the classrooms that I go to there tends to be some staff that knows the systems better than the instructors who can assist with technical issues when things go wrong.

 

[SKoprowski]

Sounds like a poorly calibrated projector to me. LCD projectors have a lot less shadow detail and lighter blacks. DLP projectors have a tendency to show more noise and have a hard time with reds and color seperation. My guess is that the projector you were showing the video on was a lower native resolution than your video and the projector had to scale it down, hence the picture noise and loss of fine detail. I suspect it is a DLP projector since you mentioned issues with the color and video noise, however the loss of shadow detail could indicate a LCD projector.