We went down to the Laemmle Sunset 5 this weekend to run a projection test of Bikini. Rick Pollard the head projectionist helped us a great deal. We were trying to figure out the best way to screen the film. Should we do Digibeta or Blu-Ray? We know for sure we did not want to screen with a DVD because the compression decreases too much of the image quality for projection in a larger space. We also did not want to spend $500 on a transfer to tape or disc. Rick told me about the Western Digital HD Media Player that connects to a USB drive. It has HDMI out which allows you to connect to a projector. I was very excited by this. This would allow us to play the movie file from a portable hard drive and keep the visual quality. My first choice was H.264 compression which got the 23GB file down to 10GB. That is twice as good as DVD compression but I still was not happy. I wanted Blu-Ray quality for our compression. After many failed attempts I chose MPEG2 compression with a minimum data rate of 28bits. This got our file down to 17GB and looks great. Now we have a portable projection format for around $200. Rick even asked me for my compression specs. He said it looked better than the other projects that he has seen projected this way. One more thing I have learned in bringing Bikini to the screen.
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