Two weeks ago, the 2013 Community of Madrid Short Film Week concluded, where together with David Priego we have been organizing the screenings at the Círculo de Bellas Artes Cinema. The theater was equipped with a Panasonic Full HD projector and as a player only with a Bluray and a DVD, but we did all the screenings only with digital files, and this did not pose any problem, nor did it require “special” technical equipment.
Every week I speak with festivals that need a Bluray or DVD disc for screenings because the theater they have is not equipped with a computer for projection. As we will see in this post, connecting a computer in a theater already equipped with a Bluray or DVD costs nothing.
First of all, to have HD quality in the screenings we have requested the h264 codec (as we have already seen in other posts, this is the standard for HD) with a medium bitrate (quality), around 15,000 (the maximum is 30,000, but it results in heavier files that can cause playback problems). The audio codec is also standard, AAC, or AC3, in this case stereo, since the digital playback output of the theater did not support Dolby 5.1. We projected this format as is, that is, we did not use any editing software.
For playback we used a MacBookPro, but any computer with at least 4GB of RAM would have worked (and you can always have a Linux distribution installed to avoid having to resort to Windows or Mac), equipped with VLC, which is free and open source, and supports subtitle files in SRT. In addition to an HDMI adapter that can be obtained at any electronics store. This computer was complemented with another MacBook to control the projector settings. This should be the basic equipment of any screening theater: a computer. In fact, it is surprising that many theaters around the world do not have something so basic in 2013, and that is certainly within reach of all festivals, no matter how small and low-budget they may be.
To replace the original Bluray player with the computer, you simply have to change the cable, it’s that easy:
Rear area of the Bluray player, removing the HDMI cable
connecting that same HDMI to the computer, equipped with VLC
Well, that’s all, we connected the audio with a minijack cable, since the audio output was not through HDMI, which would have been ideal for the sound to be in 5.1. Just by changing the cable I can now project digital files in any format; in fact, for screenings where we only had DVD, we transferred the files from the disc to the computer.
To play them all in sequence, we created a playlist with VLC:
As we can see, there is no technical or economic complication to screening with digital files; in fact, the complicated thing is to do it with discs and face the usual problems they have. Without a doubt, the time has come for festivals to abandon DVD (or any disc-based format) as a screening format, and opt for higher quality formats. You just have to try it.