Outdoor Project: Open Air Theater
I’m thinking about hanging the screen on the corner posts of the house-facing side of the gazebo in our backyard. The projector would then sit on the pathway about 20 feet away. The screen size would be 11’4″ wide by 5′ tall, which is approximately a 2.35:1 aspect ratio. I’ll make some black curtains to hang over the ends of the screen when showing a movie with a 1.85:1 aspect ratio. Anyway, here is a mock-up of the screen design:
The tutorial calls for the projector screen material to be made from curtain backing or “black-out cloth”. This is available at fabric stores like Jo-Ann’s, but only in 4′ wide sections. Fortunately, I found that 110″-wide blackout fabric is available on-line at Carl’s Place. (Carl also offers a 2″ wide black felt border that I’ll probably buy as well.)
Once I have the fabric and the frame built, there is the small matter of stapling the material on the frame so that it is nice and smooth. This could be a tough job for such a large screen. However, this tutorial about how to stretch fabric over an artist’s frame correctly should be helpful.
For video, I’m leaning toward Panasonic PT-AX200U because of its relatively high lumen output. It doesn’t do 1080p, but I just can’t justify the cost for a 1080p projector when it will only be used about a dozen times per year. Most of our movie library is not in the Blu-Ray format anyway, so a 720p projector will be just fine for our regular DVDs.
For audio, I’ve got a 5.1 surround speaker system in the closet upstairs gathering dust (which was recently displaced by the new in-wall home entertainment system in the attic). I have not one but two spare audio receivers, one which is in the garage powering my workbench speakers (yes, overkill I know) and the other is on loan to the Thurmonds. Both audio receivers were manufactured around the time that the original Dolby Pro Logic was the cutting edge surround sound processing technology (early 1990s), so neither audio system has digital audio inputs. But I think that analog audio should be adequate for this purpose.
Source: http://rus.berrett.org/blog/projects/open_air_theater/0612.html
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