With the lottery grant the major equipment purchases were a Canon Xeed SX50 Digital projector and a Packard Bell Laptop. During August 2005, Mill Camera Group received an Awards for All lottery grant to purchase equipment for running digital photograph competitions.
This page describes what we've learnt about setting up the system and how we run the competitions. It's a work in progress - as we gain experience of using the equipment, I'll add to this page.
With the lottery grant the major equipment purchases were a Canon Xeed SX50 Digital projector and a Packard Bell Laptop.
The Xeed SX50 projector has breathtaking quality and sharpness; straight from the box it is set to a maximum brightness which is very bright and means that the internal fan is quite noisy and there is a large amount of heat being blown out of the projector. I set the the projector to low brightness - which is still plenty bright enough as we use it in a darkened room and makes the noise from the projector far less noticeable.
The maximum resolution of the SX50 is 1400 x 1050 pixels; almost twice the resolution of a "conventional" 1024 x 768 pixel projector and over three times the resolution of a TV quality 800 x 600 pixel projector.
In summary, the quality of the projected image isn't likely to be limited by the projector - the laptop video circuitry and original image are more likely to contribute to any lack of quality.
One "problem" with such a high resolution is that it is higher than the screen on the laptop. A common way of using digital projectors is to "clone" the screen on the laptop - so that the projected image is identical to that on the laptop. This isn't possible with the 1400 x 1050 resolution of the SX50 unless you have a high resolution laptop.
The laptop is a "vanilla" Packard Bell system with Windows XP Home. As it comes it is not ideal for use in driving a projector. After some research and experiment, I made the following modifications to the system:
I created two users (in addition to the "standard" one created by Windows); MCG Competition and MCG Demonstration. For each user, I can then set the desktop and screen settings appropriate to the use.
Using the Control Panel I changed the Sound Scheme to "no sounds" for both of these users.
I turned off the screen saver for all users - including "power saving" options; I don't want the screen saver to suddenly appear in the middle of a competition or for the user to be logged off.
I installed some of the Microsoft Powertoys - in particular the image resizer and the TweakUI application; The former is very useful as it makes it easy to resize all the images in a directory. I use the TweakUI to turn off unwanted icons on the desktop (such as recycle bin). Alas, the powertoys were discontinued with Windows Vista; luckily there are several 3rd party image resizers that work well with Vista and 7.
Using Photoshop, I created suitable backgrounds for the desktop for each user - this will be projected, so it gives an appropriate display for the audience and it confirms that we're logged in to the correct user.
To actually project images using the digital projector, we need to use some kind of presentation software. There are some features of the software that I'd like and I'm looking at several different packages. The features I'm looking for are:
Realistically, we are unlikely to get everything! However, I've looked at some packages:
In the audio visual community the program picturestoexe (PTE) is widely used. The way it works is to load images and then generate an executable file which provides the display. In its favour are the following:
The main disadvantages are:
Powerpoint is the market leader in presentation software. It's reasonably easy to produce a slide show given a directory of images using the Photo Album feature. To try the system out I generated a small show with black background, long fade slide transition and some title slides. I could then add images to the file using the format Photo Album dialogue; this worked quite well. The version I was using was the XP release (version 10).
The pros with Powerpoint are:
The cons are:
As "freeware", public domain software the price is definitely right! openoffice is a "clone" of Microsoft Office suite. As such it offers most of the facilities of Powerpoint. Unfortunately, two of the features missing are pretty much essential for our purposes; it doesn't support Photo albums so each image would have to be added to the presentation individually; this is obviously much slower and more error prone. Secondly, it doesn't support multiple monitors.
Tony Sweet of the EAF put me on to MediaPro from Iview, its more a media management package than a presentation package and is intended to organise the sound, video and image files on the computer. Since I investigated the program, Iview have been acquired by Microsoft and the program has been renamed Microsoft Expression.
As I was struggling to get exactly what we wanted, I decided to have a try at writing my own projection software. In fact, FFP is what we now use for our competitions. Obviously, as the author, it's difficult to be entirely subjective - but here goes!
FFP is designed specifically to run camera club competitions. The projection is controlled on the laptop screen with only the images appearing on the projector. Images are loaded into the package. The images can be randomly shuffled or moved by hand. Title slides (such as "tea break" or "The End") can be locked into position so that they are unaffected by the shuffle process. A score sheet can then be printed with the title and author of the slide (if present in Exif data) and a thumbnail of the image. The entire sequence can be stored and reloaded - so the projectionist can prepare for the competition before the night.
Images can be held back by pressing the Space bar during projection.
Mix and match competitions are also supported; two images are projected simultaneously so the judge can easily compare them. FFP "runs" the competition; prompting the projectionist about which team is next and so on.
Also using simultaneous projection of two images, FFP will run a Knock Out competition. Again, FFP runs the competition; automatically "shuffling" images between rounds and trying to avoid pairing up images from the same author.
There is more about FFP here. You can download a trial version (and buy a copy for only £50!) here.
The Pros with FFP are:
The Cons are: