CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

[prior]

Hello all,

many apologies in advance if something along these lines has been asked previously...

I'm working on a little art film that aims to look into some ideas about color, the different ways in which it is made, distributed and becomes imbued with meaning. I'm focusing on the artist Ellsworth Kelly and in particular his work using just Red Green and Blue which, since this film will eventually be projected, inevitably had me thinking about CRT projectors.

Put simply I want to make it clear to the audience that the projected image uses additive color and is a composite of RGB. I hope to do this by making 3 very slightly different versions of the film (1 Red, 1 Green, 1 Blue), that would go in and out of synch.

I can imagine doing this in a couple of ways and hope some of you could help me with this..!
- The first method I thought of was somehow modifying a single projector to accept the 3 different channels that would each be assigned one lens.
- The second method would be to stack 3 projectors atop one another, mask off 2 lenses on each, and align them all as best as possible.

I'm curious as to whether the first idea is even possible and if the second idea would prove unworkable because of the different positions of the projectors, and if so whether a smaller model would help...

Phew!

Would really appreciate any thoughts or alternative ideas... there's probably another obvious method staring me in the face

Thanks a lot,

Nick

[AnalogRocks]

a 3 projector stack is do-able but will be hard to keep in alignment.
Three of the same brand will respond to the remote to turn of each color on all three projectors at the same time.

You could also do a custom projector. 1 each with three tubes of the same color then switch the projector's picture mute off/on as you need them

[AnalogRocks]

a 3 projector stack is do-able but will be hard to keep in alignment.
Three of the same brand will respond to the remote to turn of each color on all three projectors at the same time.

You could also do a custom projector. 1 each with three tubes of the same color then switch the projector's picture mute off/on as you need them

[nuttall_chris]

If the plan is to have 3 different versions of the movie, one in red, one in green and one in blue, and then project them all on to the same screen, why not just combine them in the digital domain before sending them to the projector? You could then use any projector you want, digital or CRT, without the complications of stacking or modifying a projector.

Chris.

[prior]

Thanks both,

Chris - what I don't quite understand is if I were to layer 3 different versions in the editing stage, would the RGB combine to make secondary colors & white in exactly the same way as if it were done 'live' so to speak?

[nuttall_chris]

[damien55]

I did a test in photoshop and separating the color informations in a picture to recombine them was actually easy.
And I'm sure that some video editing software could do it with very few filters and the fusion of layer

Here is what I did in photoshop:
-Open a color picture
-Duplicate the picture on 3 other layers
-apply the level tool to the top layer and move the white point of the output level for Green and Blue to 0 instead of 255 to get the Red picture
-deactivate the layer to see the one below
-repeat the two last point to get the Green and Blue pictures
-reactivate the 3 layers
-now change the 3 layers settings to difference and now the image is back to normal but composed of 3 layers


If you use an editing software like Adobe Premiere which is very close to photoshop. I'm sure you could do the same things.
Make your 3 films and apply filters to isolate the color you want in each and then merge the layers like in photoshop.

I personally use Avid Liquid to do my video editing and surely the same result could be achieved. I also think that there is a filter that does an effect like that. It randomly shifts the channels about or something similar.


Here is what I did to test:


You can see the 3 RGB layers and the difference mode. I shisted the red and green layers to show you the effect you get.

Hope this helps

Damien