what are the digital projection formats?

[Graham Jones]

Anyone tell me the incumbent and imminent digital projection formats? Be assured I have googled this - however due to the subject being in such flux I can't get a good handle on it. As far as I can tell digital projection, at for instance film festivals, seems to be a range of DVD, DVCAM, DIGIBETA, HDCAM. Any big ones I'm missing or big ones coming soon I should know about - including disk based storage.

Many thanks.

[Boyd Ostroff]

You're really talking about the storage medium/data format as opposed to the projector itself. You are correct that everything is in flux though. The big projectors that I've used had native component video input although there were adaptors which accepted s-video and VGA. I think the newer ones will have DVI input and probably HDMI which seems to be a new standard.

In our case we used drove the big Barco projector with a Doremi hard disk video deck which output component video. We loaded the video into the deck directly from my laptop running Final Cut Pro via a firewire > component media converter. I wanted to avoid the step of going to DVD since that involves data compression which might degrade the already fragile DV image on a big screen.

I sort of doubt that there will be any hard and fast standard for media in the case of film festivals, so it would be a good idea to directly contact any which interest you.