Daily Planet

Daily Planet (DP). Best practice currently is Powerpoint in HD format. The Powerpoint should be on a thumbdrive or other portable media. We will load the Powerpoint onto the Windows servers that run the DP. Our experience is that Powerpoints work best, but we ALWAYS want to check in advance to make sure that all the media loads, especially if the presentation includes movies or audio. We can accommodate laptops for output, but this is not recommended.

The DP can display up to three screens at once, in various formats (big screen below, two small ones up top; one huge screen; two screens stacked; others). Each screen (channel) can be independently controlled. There are a set number of formats. I’ll try to send along a graphic of the formats available. We can also do a HUGE presentation of a movie or other media on the DP in a special “Event” mode. This “Event” mode requires special processing. The final output is 1920 x 1905 pixels, but the system will only accept HD (1920 x 1080) input. One way to accommodate this is to compose the movie in After Effects (or other video editing software) at 1920 x 1905, then “squash” the movie down to 1920 x 1080 at rendering. It will then be “unsquashed” when it plays through the system. We’ve tested this and it works fine, although there may be some slight loss of video quality.

As with any projected image, there is some light bounce in the DP; that is, light hits the DP screen and then scatters. This can cause burn out or wash out of the images. We recommend over-saturating your images by about 10% and upping the contrast by about the same amount for best results. There is no “best” setting, and again testing in advance is highly recommended.

We have two microphone channels for the DP, so you can have two presenters, or a presenter and an interviewer. If there’s only one presenter, we usually hold one mic for audience Q and A post-show.