The Big Picture

Last week, I was invited to see a private preview screening of The Dark Knight Rises, three hours before the long-awaited midnight showings on July 20, 2012. The next morning, of course, I awoke to the news of a horrific shooting at one of those showings in Aurora, Colorado, in which 12 people were killed and nearly 60 were wounded, some critically. I have no idea how the movie figured into the gunman's plans—if at all—but the event has certainly cast a pall over what would have otherwise been just another Hollywood mega-blockbuster opening.

As I recount in my coverage of the world premier of Brave, it's the first movie with a soundtrack mixed for the Dolby Atmos sound system, which envelops the audience much more than conventional 5.1 or 7.1. But as a brand new technology, Atmos is currently installed in only 14 theaters around the country.

Do you live near one of them? If so, I strongly recommend seeing Brave there so you can experience the next generation of cinema sound. Here's a list of theaters with Dolby Atmos:

I saw Men In Black 3 last night, and as with most 3D movies, I chose to see this one at an Imax theater, which uses two projectors—one for each eye—to increase the overall brightness of the image. Even though MIB3 was shot in 2D and converted to 3D in post-production, I thought the 3D effect was quite good overall. In fact, it seemed to me that the movie had been shot with 3D in mind, with lots of depth in many images—I especially enjoyed Agent J's fall from the skyscraper as he jumps back to 1969.

The most important consumer-related product introduction at NAB was a new projector and source device from Red Digital Cinema, which is best known for its digital-cinema cameras. As its name implies, the REDray Laser Projector uses lasers as its illumination source, and the red, green, and blue lasers are housed in a separate module (the larger box seen directly above the projector in the photo) that connects to the projector itself via fiber optics. Even more interesting, multiple laser modules can be ganged together to produce more light for larger screens, and the lasers are rated to last more than 25,000 hours with virtually no change in color or light output.

Outside the Red Digital Cinema demo theater, I saw this 60-inch quad-HD (3840x2160) flat panel made by Planar. No one could tell me much about it—the Planar rep wasn't around at that moment—except that it's an LED-illuminated LCD, probably edgelit. It did look mighty crisp and sharp.

And now for something completely over the top—an autostereoscopic (glasses-free) 16:9 rear-projection display measuring 200 inches diagonally! This behemoth was developed by Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) and consists of 200 small DLP projectors behind a special diffuser screen and Fresnel lens. Amazingly, you can walk around and see objects from different angles and even behind them, much like a true hologram. There was some obvious vertical banding in the 1920x1080 image, but I found no one who could explain why.

Each year at NAB, NewTek, maker of the TriCaster video switcher, hosts a panel discussion about the future of television called Broadcast Minds. This year, the panel was moderated by Leo Laporte, head of the TWiT network that produces my Home Theater Geeks podcast among many others. Seen here in the center, he is joined by (left to right) Jeff Hawley, Director of Customer Experience for Yamaha; Bill Chapman, VP of Creative and Engineering Technology for Turner Broadcasting; Jeff Jacobs, Senior VP of Production Strategies for MTV; and Kevin Pollack, comedian, actor, and host of a popular podcast called Kevin Pollack's Chat Show.