With a tight budget, I had to make cuts across the board to pull off the media package without sacrificing too much quality. Since I knew there was no way I was going to even be able to financially stay in the HD ball park, first thing to go was the quality chain from the computer to the projector. To maintain the 1400×900 resolution coming from the computer, I’d have to have all sorts of digital splitters, scalers, and switchers capable of handling the HD signal and you can imagine how much money that was going to cost. It’s important to realize once you go down in video quality, you can’t really go back up without spending a fortune in gear designed to make the scaling up process look better than it should. In other words, once you smash a 1064×768 source down to 640×480, trying to scale it back up to the original source is just going to create video noise that makes the image look fuzzy or blurred. And you don’t want that.

So everything is run analog BNC from the$20 DVI to RCA adapters we bought at the apple store to the yellow RCA jack in the back of the projector. I know some of you are cringing right now, but let me say me this. If I had the money, I know how to do it right. But I didn’t have the money so I had to face the bold reality that 99% of the people we were doing this for (i.e. those attending the church services) would never know we skimped on anything…well…until now. Truth is, it still looks really good and unless I had something to A/B the difference, I might just argue to the grave it is not worth the money to go HD (yet).

Now, if you are not trying to run a system where one image fits multiple screens, you can keep the digital chain for a lot less money than it would cost us to do the same thing. Most settings only need one computer, ProPresenter, a nice dvi to composite splitter, and some long cables and our in business. Not to mention, for a portable church, everything you do needs to be easy to set-up and tear down.

So how do we set all of this up on a Sunday morning without losing our minds or all our volunteers? I’m still working on that one…but I’ll tell you how we set it up and make it all happen in under an hour in the next post.