Dramaqueen
Member
Someone converting a stereo room into a 5.1.4 scope cinema says the last piece he is waiting on is a madVR to handle aspect ratio switching, after deciding he did not want to keep zooming the projector by hand. He started the conversion on 19 July, which is a quick turnaround for that much work, and the reasoning behind the box is familiar to anyone who has lived with a scope screen for more than a month.
Lens memory sounds like it solves this. It does not, quite. You are asking a motor to land on the same zoom and shift position over and over, and the repeatability drifts. Not enough to see on a test pattern the day you set it up, but enough to notice as a thin sliver of light above the top masking six months later. It is also slow. The better part of ten seconds of the lens crawling between presets every time the ratio changes, which is fine at the start of a film and genuinely annoying with anything that shifts ratio mid-stream.
Handling it in the processor sidesteps the mechanics completely. The projector never moves, the box scales into the right window, and it can react to a ratio change on the fly instead of waiting for you to reach for a preset. What you give up is money, and you are now trusting an external scaler over the one already in the projector, which is not automatically an upgrade on every source.
Is anyone still running lens memory as their daily driver? I want to know whether the drift people keep describing is a specific-model problem or just what a zoom motor does after enough cycles.
Lens memory sounds like it solves this. It does not, quite. You are asking a motor to land on the same zoom and shift position over and over, and the repeatability drifts. Not enough to see on a test pattern the day you set it up, but enough to notice as a thin sliver of light above the top masking six months later. It is also slow. The better part of ten seconds of the lens crawling between presets every time the ratio changes, which is fine at the start of a film and genuinely annoying with anything that shifts ratio mid-stream.
Handling it in the processor sidesteps the mechanics completely. The projector never moves, the box scales into the right window, and it can react to a ratio change on the fly instead of waiting for you to reach for a preset. What you give up is money, and you are now trusting an external scaler over the one already in the projector, which is not automatically an upgrade on every source.
Is anyone still running lens memory as their daily driver? I want to know whether the drift people keep describing is a specific-model problem or just what a zoom motor does after enough cycles.
