esc's Home Theater Odyssey

[esc]

Here it is finally. From roughly the beginning to its current state. I have been promising I would get pics of my room up for a couple years now and here they are.

I am still in the middle of editing alot of the pics (I took way too many during construction), but here is what I have so far.
Hopefully in the next couple weeks I'll have them all up.

[esc]

Back in October 2005 I had sold my 46" RCA TV and started the whole process of building a theater room. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of what the room looked like before with the old TV and sound system (and 70's couches I had inherited from my parents... yeesh!). In 2004 or 2005 I had gotten ahold of a free Proxima, 250 Lumen, 50 or more decibel projector which served it purposes (it got moving pictures on the wall) but that was about it. The screen door effect was aweful, it was loud and hot, but it was pretty neat and continued my love affair with home theater. I got hooked on the idea of a projector.

You can see in the pictures the old white screen and black border painted on the wall, and marked out in green painter's tape the approximate size and position of where I thought the new screen might end up being.

[esc]

Fast forward to January 06 and not much has happened yet. I am in the process of saving for theater hardware, so the room is being used for storage and occasionally a space is cleared to measure out cloth for the curtains. In the pics you can see some of my toys and theater decorations.


I wanted to get done what I could while I had free time before the real construction began, so I bought way too many bolts of a black fabric called Pleather. It was about $3 or $4 per sq yard so it was affordable and available at WalMart. It is quite heavy, with cloth on one side and thick and rubbery on the other, so it is very durable and stretchy. Because of its qualitys, it's sometimes used for S&M gear (just FYI). The dimensions of the room weren't going to change so I got alot of the curtins cut and sewn way before any of the construction was done or the screen went up.

[esc]

.

[esc]

The furnature also arrived in January. It was a backward way of doing it to get the furnature as one of the first things, but I found a set of black leather seating at a local discount liquidation place for cheap and if I didn't pick them up that day, they would have been gone.

[esc]

Puttying the snot out of all the walls to get rid of bumps and cracks.
I worked my ass off to get the front wall as smooth as possible (bottom 2 pics) as I thought the screen would be painted directly onto the wall. Little did I know what the future had in store. (I'll be putting up my 3rd screen in 2007 as there were a couple screen disasters looming in my future.)

[esc]

Early in the year my players arrived to replace my Panasonic 5 Disc non-upconverting player which I am now using as a multi disc CD player becuase it is getting very twitchy when playing DVDs.

I decided on the single disc upconverting Panasonic S77S.
Fantastic player and highly reccomended for anyone who is into picture quality on any size or age of TV.

review - http://www.bytesector.com/data/bs-article.asp?id=503

It has more settings and sub menus than anyone would know what to do with which can be very confusing when trying to navigate at first. I can't really fault it though. The image it produces and the increase in sound quality that I have noticed over other players more than make up for the menu issues and it only being a single disc player. It is not just the crispness and quality of the image that is better with this player, there is also now a depth to the image on alot of DVDs that I had never seen before which is quite impressive. The increase in video quality is not just over HDMI. For a time I used an S-Video to RCA adapter to run the player out to a TV made in the 80's with spectacular results. We're not talking instant HDTV here, but as I've said, the increase in image quality on any screen is striking.

I also picked up a Toshiba SD4980 for my Region 0 and PAL needs.
It has nowhere near the picture or sound quality of the S77S, but its great for overseas DVDs.

[esc]

The projector arrives!

After much deliberation over Sanyos, Sonys, BenQs, Panasonics, DLPs and LCDs, and much input from the forum I settled on the Sony VPL HS60 Cineza. Based on its specs and many reviews it seemed to be what I was after. Other than a slight motion blurring effect (due to it being LCD) that is visible to only some people, I have been more than impressed with it. The screen door effect is non existant unless you are 3ft away from the screen. The colors are vibrant and upconverted images to 720p or 1080i look fantastic. Plus it has multiple inputs, including 1 HDMI port, and endless menus, settings, knobs and dials for adjustment.

[esc]

Me celebrating the arrival of the projector.
I loves my Malibu !

[esc]

A few drinks later and I was ready to plug it in...

I just set it on top of a speaker in my empty room and threw in a few DVDs.

Whoops, we'll need some calibration here.

[EM3]

Nice pics! Looks like you have put in quite a lot of work. So what kind of screen disasters are you talking about?

[esc]

I had LOTR FOTR EE and War of the Worlds handy so I threw them in. Upconverted over HDMI they looked very impressive on just the wall with no player or projector calibration. The low quality if the images is due to my 3.1 MegaPixel $100 digital camera, not the image quality produced by the proj. I'll try to borrow a much higher quality camera that can take better pictures in the dark for when I put up pics of the final screen images.

The pics don't look that great, but it gives you an idea of just how bright it was. Check out the level of detail on Gimli's headgear. I had never seen those ornate metal carvings before.

[esc]

.

[esc]

This one is taken on a night setting with a fatser shutter speed.

Very cool detail in the costumes and hair.

[esc]

More putty, sanding and paint later and the wall was looking good.

Here is the first test hanging of the curtains to see if the method I had come up with to hang them would keep them up.
It involved lots of nails and swearing.

[esc]

More curtain sewing on the 60 year old sewing machine I borrowed from a co-worker.

[esc]

Behind the door of the theater Where the component rack is going to go. Let the destruction of the house begin!

[esc]

Construction started around April. Here's my boyfriend in the storage room behind the theater getting ready to start banging holes in the walls to make room for the component rack.

[esc]

My house is trying to send me secret ALIAS messages through the drywall ?

[esc]

.

[esc]

..

[tomdkat]

Cool! When do you expect to be done?

Peace...

[esc]

its about 95% done now. just a few more toys and electronic components need to arrive.

These pictures are months old and I have alot more done to the theater as of now. I only need to find more time to put the rest of the pics up.

[Pirate]

Looks like it's coming along great. I can't wait to see the finished product!

Nice job!

[sub780lime]

I felt like i went on a journey through the history of your theater...good job. I am really excited for the end of the book...i mean theater.

[esc]

Cutting shelves for the rack + my little helper dog Sam.

[esc]

Rack from the front and back.

After that had been started it was time to start putting together the riser that would raise up the seating in the rear of the theater by about 8".

All of the Xbox and PS2 controller cables are run underneath the riser and the controllers plug into ports on the front, underneath the seating. Since the Nintendo Wii is backwads compatible with GameCube games, I didn't have to worry about GameCube ports, and the Wii and XBox 360 are both wireless, so the controllers for those are already taken care of when I get those systems.

[esc]

.

[esc]

..

[esc]

The first tests to see just how we are going to hold the Xbox plugs in place.

YAY! 2 Xbox controller plugs just barely fit into a standard electrical outlet plate. That made things so much easier.

[esc]

Paint It! Paint It Black! Black As Night!

[esc]

A little silver trim and black paint and the rack is looking good.

[esc]

Taking out the carpet and prepping the ceiling for the proj to go up.

[esc]

WOOO! I have speaker wires coming out of my walls!

[esc]

The carpet arrived in June and the flooring place sent over a super hottie to install it. Unfortunately I didn't get a very good picture of him. Nice carpet though. Its called Illustrious Phantom.

[esc]

My buddy Neil putting up the projector mount.

[esc]

Furnature is in, its starting to look good

[esc]

Early in June I put up the screen and it all went to hell for a few weeks.

I had decided to try a screen paint product from a company called DIYTheatre.
Their web site is quite good and when I called them, a very knowledgeable guy helped me to pick out a screen paint configuration that he thought would work well for my projector,
room size, and light levels. Based on everything I had heard about the product, I assumed it would work out well for my needs...

I don't have many pictures of what followed, or the actual destruction of the first screen, but you'll get an idea of the frustration involved.

[esc]

Here is an email I wrote to a couple friends explaining what had happened. Everyone that I know knew that I was working hard on this project and when the screen went KA-Blewie word got around, so I had to explain it over and over on MSN. rather than retype it all again, I'll just cut and paste an email I wrote. More pics are below.

.
.
.
.

k, heres the super the long version.

so lets see.. I applied the screen paint over a weekend. It is a nice high quality product and would have looked great, except they forgot to mention a couple things in the instructions

It goes on in 4 coats. the first 2 are a light grey primer which is actually a thick latex, so it doesnt respond like normal wall paint. And the second 2 coats are a super reflective top coat composed of a translucent polimer with hundreds of thousands of tiny beads of glass and flecks of silver in it.

I put up the projector and got the image to the size I wanted it, taped off the area on the wall and applied the first 2 coats of grey. The image looked fantastic with just the base coats on. The next day I put on the first coat of the reflective top coat and then it all started to go to hell.

For some fudged up reason, as soon as I put the top coat on, there were 3 areas of the screen which began to bubble up like I had dripped acid on the wall. they were tiny areas, but you would see them if you watched a movie long enough. I swore alot at that point and went to bed. By morning the bubbled up areas had gone down to an almost unnoticable level and I flipped on the projector to see what it looked like with the first reflective coat on. It was not pretty. You could see every verticle roll mark that the roller had left. I thought it might be just because it was a first coat, so I rolled on the second reflective layer. A few hours later I checked it out again and it was worse. Now you could see every roll mark made by the roller from both coats.

Rob took a look at it and thought it may be because I put on the 2 coats too lightly, so I figured I had nothing to lose anyway, so Rob (who has done alot more painting than me) put on a 3rd diagonal, really thick coat. when that dried you could kinda still see the first 2 coats plus now the third diagonal coat.

A lot of online research later and I discovered that screen paint optical layers like this are nearly impossible to apply unless you have painted 1000 walls or are very very lucky. With a roller you have to be very precise. the second the optical coat hits the wall it begins to dry and if there is any overlap, the area where it overlaps will show up if a bright light is shone on it :s

So I emailed the guy at diytheatre.com that helped me pick this screen paint configuration and I found out that I could paint over it, but I had to sand the surface lightly first. I decided to buy an air compresser spraying attachment to spray on the optical layer this time.

So I started to sand and when I hit the corner of the screen area, the optical layer began to peel off.
That was actually pretty cool.
I peeled off the whole optical layer leaving the grey primer coats on the wall. I still have it and it is toally intact. I could use it as a big table cloth. It just looks like a plastic sheet....

however, when peeling off the optical layer, when I got to the part of the primer layer that had bubbled up, the primer layers came off too, exposing the drywall underneath in a fairly large section.

I tried to sand the edges of the newly exposed drywall section down so I could putty it and make it smooth with the rest of the wall again. This stuff is definatly not paint! it was like trying to sand down a rubber boot. it ripped and flaked and I could not get the primer layers to smooth out, so I figured that since the optical layers came off so good, the first 2 primer coats would too! !!!WRONG!!!

I started at the corner and worked my way up. I realized about a minute in that this idea had been a mistake. Allow me to reiterate ... THIS STUFF IS NOT PAINT! The primer layers had bonded with the wall and I was taking off massive sections of the original wall paint (attractively called Natural Linnen) plus the top paper layer of the drywall, exposing the cardboardy underside of the dry wall plus the chalky innerds of the drywall in a few areas.

It was too late to turn back now, so I ripped as carefully as I could just saying 'fuck it fuck it fuck it fuck it, I'll putty and sand it later' all the while tearing my wall all to shit.

Now I was left with a 45X80" rectangle of mangled, exposed drywall in the middle of my pristine Natural Linnen wall... OH! did I mention that by this point I was thinking I was nearly done the project and had hung black curtains and had moved all my leather furnature into the room, along with all of the electronic components... and I would now have to putty up the wall and sand. Drywall putty dust is evil. Its superfine, white, and gets everywhere. no matter what kind of protective gear you wear, it will find a way into every crevise of your being... OH! and I had just had brand new carpet put in a few days before. The theater gods were not happy with me for some reasaon... did I buy the wrong projector ?

There was no way I was going to move the furnature out of the room since it barely fit through the door in the first place and had already been moved in and out twice and was starting to show scuffs in places.

I moved all of the furnature as far away from the mangled wall as possible and covered it with plastic. I taped garbage bags over my in-wall compnent rack to keep out dust and then constrcuted a cacoon out of a lot of garbage bags and green painters tape. It went floor to celing, wall to wall, completely covering the new carpet and sectioned off the front quarter of the room. Quite proud of my little bio-dome I had created, I sanded down the wall to a managable smoothness and started to putty the snot out of the wall. This required ALOT of putty. the 'hole' in the wall was 2-3mm deeper than painted surface of the wall in places and I had to be extra careful with the edges of the hole to make sure that I had enough wall putty over those spots to smooth it all out or elese there would be a noticable dip in the surface of the wall.
Over the whole project, from 2005 - mid 2006 I used about 5L of wall goo on a 50sq foot section of wall. I'd hate to see what my lungs look like.

24 hours of drying later, I entered my little cacoon and started to sand, and it turned out pretty good. a couple days of work later, the hole was made flush with the rest of the wall for the most part. I just had to patch up a couple of places with more putty and sand it down a touch more here and there and it was ready to go. I let the dust settle and put on a few coats of regular wall primer, and eventually a $5 can of very light grey paint from Liquidation World and slapped up an MDF border which looks quite snappy. The grey color of the paint helps to increase contrast levels so blacks are deeper and darker and don't appear as washed out grey colors.

My real screen arrives in a couple weeks and hopefully it will meet expectations as it uses the same 'glass beaded' technology as my first attempt at painting, however this time it is professionsally made and should be quite eye popping as the hyper-reflectivity of the glass balls imbedded in the fabric artificially increases the percieved light output of the projector by 2.5 times. I'm trying to go for the look of a back lit CRT TV.


.
.
.
.
.

So there you have it. I am still not totally happy with the screen I eventually put up. It is a Da-Lite 2.5 Gain Light-Contrast Glass Beaded screen. The gain is great but the image quality is degraded slightly. Da-Lite has a 2.8 gain screen that supposedly has no degradation of the image, but is twice the cost of what I paid for the 2.5 gain. So I'll stick with what I have currently and upgrade probably sometime in 2007. No one but me notices the 'problems' with the Da-Lite 2.5 anyway.

[esc]

Part of the primer layer of the screen still on the wall with the exposed, ripped drywall behind it.