Need to upscale an HD image

[pugwash4x4]

Hi Guys,

First post here, hope you can be of help.

I'm a commercial installer of projection equipment into the retail market. Usually do smaller installs along with a fair few edge blend installs (using both onboard Panasonic stuff and relevant external solutions). Usually we would be bought on board at the start of a project and would work with a production studio to show large images in natvie resolutions as produced by the aforementioned production studio.

Have a new customer who have lost faith in their current installer and is looking to do a siginificant install.

Have specced a 4 HD projector edge blend (arrange in a square)- no probs, nice and easy. Customer phones me today to say that they only have a normal HD image and their production unit in Dubai have no idea how to upscale it!

So, can you guys help? how do i upscale the standard 1920 x 1080 res image to 3840x2160? (lets ignore the 10% we'll lose on edge blending- i can deal with that later). There must be a box that can do it?

any help and advice gratefully received.

Thanks

Pugwash

 

[eiren]

You could use a PC with two ATI HD5870 cards in it... they would then use the new Eyefinity feature to scale up and send the signal to each of the 4 projectors independantly.

Here's some info on Eyefinity:

ATI Eyefinity Technology

Hands on: ATI Eyefinity review | News | TechRadar UK

 

[NonPayingMember]

You need a dedicated edge-blending unit to do this properley. Barco do one, I think TVOne probably do one, not sure that Extron or Kramer do. It's not really my forte especially four screens. But I know I wouldn't want to be leaving a customer of this calibre with his 8mp display relying soley on Windows to work!!!

Also have you or your client considered just getting a 2k4k projector big enough to handle the screen size? The JVC (also used by Meridian in their 810 series video system) is absolutely incredibly and includes the scaling system to do it from Faroudja who Meridian own. You can stack two for more light output. Res is 4096 by 2160 from memory, about 3000-4000 Lumens.

 

[pugwash4x4]

Thanks guys.

Have access to a number of edge blend units (either onboard using Panasonic or Sanyo) or external. AFAIK none of the edge blenders actually upscale- they just layer up using a number of different sources. Which will sort of do what i need- but isn't ideal, and they tend to be expensive (circa £12k- 15k) which on top of the cost of the HD projectors takes the project out of the customers budget.

Problem with the meridien stuff is that it isn't designed to be 24/7, nor is it bright enough-i need to be above 6300 ANSI for the bright retail enviroment it is going into!

will have a google for a JVC 4k2k projector as the meridiens are ~100k which again is too much for this client

grrr

 

[NonPayingMember]

The JVC is about £70k from memory, but has 4 Dual-Link DVI inputs that need to be individually addressed by a video processor or PC to produce the single 4k2k size. The Meridian 810 is now right up at £150k area now since Christmas, although it includes the Meridian Faroudja video processor and a 2.35:1 lens sled and kit and calibration of the unit by Meridian.

 

[pugwash4x4]

The JVC is about £70k from memory, but has 4 Dual-Link DVI inputs that need to be individually addressed by a video processor or PC to produce the single 4k2k size. The Meridian 810 is now right up at £150k area now since Christmas, although it includes the Meridian Faroudja video processor and a 2.35:1 lens sled and kit and calibration of the unit by Meridian.

150K is right out unfortunately- need to come in at less than half that (yep know its going to be difficult)

Looked at the JVC, but it still works out cheaper to use 4 HD panasonics edge blended to produce a 4k2k image (although admittedly we'll lose 20% of the image because of the blend)

Porblem is that we still face the same issues whether using the JVC or 4xedge blended panasonics- customer only has 1920x1080 content, so how the hell do i turn that into something we can use. ideally i need just the upscaling bit of the meridien kit- will approach and see if they can help!

ideally i would use post production to upscale from Full HD to 4k2k, but don't know if this is even possible!

 

[choddo2006]

Perhaps you could use 4 video processors in parallel to crop & zoom a quarter of the screen each? I'm fairly sure DVDO products don't let you zoom to such an extreme (but may be wrong) - maybe Lumagen do?

By the way - if you're just zooming a 1920x1080 image, why wouldn't you just throw a bigger picture? Not possible with any current projector?

 

[eiren]

Seems like a lot of work though. A good HTPC will cost you a grand or so, and will do the job