Media Room walkthrough - Part 6

Step 6 - Enjoy


The room is set up, the projector is mounted, the furniture is arranged. We're finally at the end, right?

Not exactly.

Before I regale you with what still needs to be done, let me show you what I have and how it all looks.

The pics below show the media room in action, first with Halo 3, and then Rock Band. The pic below is the Halo 3 match loading screen, in 108" of glory. To get a good perspective for how big this image is, look at the bottom left and see if you can make out the silhouette of the front speaker. That speaker is about 6" tall, approximately.





Here's a shot of the screen from the foyer. The two openings you can see here, the mini-arch in the middle and the opening on the left, will end up being covered by a curtain to block out additional light and distractions. But more on that later.

And again from inside.

The projector in action. It has two lamp settings, low and standard, and the light intensity between the two is really not very noticeable. Plus, the projector makes almost NO noise when on the low setting, the lamp life is doubled, and there's hardly any loss of light. So I keep mine on low almost all the time.
Another shot from the side.

Here's my daughter and my nephew playing Rock Band.

Another pic. And no, my nephew isn't posing for the camera... that's really how he plays Rock Band and Guitar Hero.

A shot from behind, to get a feel for the scale. They're sitting about ten feet away from the screen.

And here they are standing next to it.
It also gets used for things besides XBox games. I've watched quite a few movies already, and the atmosphere when watching a movie at night with the lights out is just amazing. I'm totally hooked. So far, I've watched Casino Royale, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ghostbusters 1 and 2 (yeah, #2 sucks, but hey, it's the Ghostbusters), one of my daughter's Bratz movies, Superbad, Willow, Black Hawk Down, and a few others I can't remember at the moment.

So all in all, I'd say the media room experiment has been a rousing success. However, I still need to do quite a few things to finish it off, and I'm also looking toward some potential future upgrades.

The to-do list for the current media room includes the following:


1. I need to get curtains up on the two openings from the foyer that I mentioned above.


2. I need to get curtains and black out cloth on the window to the right. I bought some of the material already, and have it tacked up there for now, but I need to get that finished. The light coming in from that side window during the day, even with the blinds closed, was enough to almost completely wash out the right side of the screen, making it nearly impossible to see anything there.


3. I need more BOC and curtains for the four back windows, to help seal out of the light.


4. I need a solution for getting the wires and cords out of the way.


5. I need to figure out the furniture layout. Currently, I have 2 chairs, the papasan, some bean bags, a stool, and a little rotating/reclining gamer chair. If needed, the media room could probably seat 4 people comfortably. I'd like to get that up to 5, 6, or even 7, but unfortunately some of the furniture in there is too big, and the room itself is pretty narrow, making it hard to squeeze too much in there. I can make rows of seating, but that's also a problem, since I don't want any seating too close to the screen, and I can't go too far back since that's where the foosball table is.





A quick side note: another project I'm working on, is building a device that will raise or lower the curtains I put on the side wall remotely. I bought a cheap remote control car and took it apart, intending to get at the motor. I want to wrap the curtain around a metal rod, hang it at the top of the mini arch, and use the motor to raise/lower the curtain using the car's remote control. If I can get that working, then next I may try and make a curtain for screen itself, so I can remotely raise the screen curtain and make it feel even more like a movie theater.



Here's a pic of the car. You can see the motor at the front of the car, near the solo front left tire.

And yes, there are probably existing products I can buy to do this, but doing it myself is waaaay more fun. Plus I get to take things apart and see how they work.

Next are the upgrades that I want to start looking at:

1. A 1080p Projector. It's first on my list, but in reality I probably won't get it for some time. Good 1080p projectors are expensive - I think the low end ones are around $2200 - so I'll have to put this purchase off for about a year I think. Once the prices come down, I'll start looking into it. And the 720p one I have is good enough to hold me off for a while.

2. A Playstation 3. I want to get one of these because of the built-in Blu-Ray drives, so I can start collecting BR movies. A blu-ray movie on a 1080p screen will be pretty incredible looking. I'm thinking I'll get one later this year.

3. A new receiver. I'll eventually want to get a higher-end receiver that can do some upconverting, among other things. Expect this to cost anywhere from $750 to $1000.

4. New speakers. Not too worried about these, but I'll have to do it eventually. Estimating around $300-$500.

5. Furniture. Mentioned this already, but if I start having more people over, I'll need to get something that they can ALL be comfortable in for long periods of time. You can't watch a 2hour movie lying on bean bags on a hardwood floor. You just can't.

So that's about it. The media room has been a blast so far, and my original concern that I might not get a whole lot of use out of it has been completely blown away. I'm still working on it, and I'll post the additional changes I make if people really want to see them, but it's already at the point where I can watch movies or play games every night and still be amazed by the effect. In fact, my eyes were hurting for the first week because they had to dart all over the place just to see everything on the screen.

Hopefully, if anyone else wants to try to put together a modest media room, they can get some use out of these blogs. I know I didn't have totally accurate accounting on all of this, but I hit all of the main pieces, and anyone trying to do the same thing shouldn't get surprised.

That's all for now. I'll let you know how the RC curtain project goes next. Apparently I need to learn a lot about gear-to-weight ratios. :)

Media Room walkthrough - Part 5

Step 6 - The Projector

So now that the rest of the room is pretty much done, there's only one thing left to do... mount the projector.

Now, this is probably going to end up being the most expensive part of the entire process, because good projectors run anywhere from $500 to $5000, depending on what exactly you want. As usual, I was lucky, since I could rely on my friend Jared and his expertise in the subject. In fact, he had just recently gotten a new projector for Christmas, a Mitsubishi HC 1500, that was pretty highly rated and well thought of. He got his from Best Buy for somewhere in the $1200-$1300 range, which includes the protection plan they're always trying to sell you. When I started projector shopping, it was still around $1000 in price at Best Buy.

I checked around and looked at a few other models, but in the end I went with the solid bet and decided on the HC 1500. I checked on Amazon.com and lo and behold, it was selling for around $775! So I ordered it, along with a 25ft HDMI cable (around $30), and a ceiling mount for the projector (around $60). So with tax, I think the whole order cost me in the neighborhood of $950. And on top of that, I would get it in only 3-4 days.

The first two pics are of all the boxes and other stuff strewn about the floor when I got my delivery. And yes, it looks - and feels - like Christmas morning.

Here's a pic of the mount. This will let me hang the projector from the ceiling. Getting this thing mounted was a Herculean effort, and a story which I'll probably save for another post.

The box for the mount. I know... it's tough to contain your excitement.

The HC1500 is a 720p projector, with about 1600 lumens, which makes it plenty capable of handling my meager video requirements. I think ultimately, I'd like to get a 1080p projector, but the decent ones at this time are still around $2000 I think, so that will be a purchase that will have to wait just a little while longer. This is a budget media room, remember?

Here's a shot of the projector itself. It's very compact, not too heavy, and pretty easy to use. You'll see in this pic that it's actually sitting on the box, which is turned on it's side, and set up on top of my foosball table. Not the most ideal setting, but I really wanted to try it out. :)

The back of the projector. The power cord on the left, and the HDMI cord right next to it. Also has an S-Video port and a VGA port (and cable) so I can plug my laptop in if I want to.

Now, I didn't actually get this mounted until a few days after I got everything, and that's partly because it wasn't easy. I mentioned above that it was quite the task, and I'll save you the details, but it mostly had to do with not having all the right tools to get this done.

As you'll see in this pic, I attached the projector mount to a piece of white-painted wood, purchased at Home Depot (I think it was only like $6), and then attached the wood to the ceiling. The reason is because it's tough to be able to perfectly hit the cross beams in the ceiling just right with such a small mount. So the piece of wood lets me securely mount it to two cross beams, instead of just one, and thus feel a lot safer about hanging an $800 piece of equipment from my ceiling.

Here's a better view of the work. You can see that the wood is nailed to the ceiling and the mount is bolted to the wood. I put the nails in a different angles, to help hold in the wood, but i think ideally what I'll need to do is go back and screw it in. And I bolted the mount towards the back end of the wood, which allowed me to set the zoom on the projector about halfway and have it still fit comfortable on the screen.

In the above pic, you can also see two silver bolts in the bottom of the mount, nearest the projector. The mount comes with an Allen wrench that lets you loosen or tighten those bolts, and adjust the orientation of the projector. This way you can get the picture aligned just right, then tighten everything up to hold it steady.

In this pic, you can see that the power cable and HDMI cable are actually running from the projector, across the ceiling, to hanging hooks that I put in by the rear right speaker.

Here's a close up of the hooks. They're just the standard hooks that you screw into the ceiling to hang things. In this case, I'm using them to keep the cords out of the way.

Now the wire/cord situation is still less than ideal, but I haven't yet come up with a solution. Ideally, I'd have some of that plastic stuff that you can attach to the ceiling/wall and run the wires or cords through there. And that may be what I end up doing. But for now, none of it is in the way, and it's all behind the viewers anyway, so no one has really even noticed or said anything about any of it.

I'd also need to get a new HDMI cable before I can do anything to cover it up. The 25ft cable works, but it's really the barest minimum in length that I need to connect the projector to the receiver and not have it pulled tight anywhere. What I really need is a 30ft cable, so I'd have the extra slack to have it run along the corners and not pull on either the projector or the receiver.

Also, I need to mention an additional purchase. The power cable for the projector isn't long enough to reach the outlet when mounted on the ceiling. But it is a standard PC-type power cord. So I just went to Fry's and bought a cord extender, which is basically a 1ft long power cord that connects two other cords. Using that, I attached a second cord that I already had, and more than doubled the length of the power cord, allowing me to run it across the ceiling and hang down to the outlet as you saw above. The extender was only a couple dollars too, maybe $3 if I remember right.

So there we go. I got the Projector, got it mounted, and got it connected, and all for around $950. That brings the running tally to around $1550 just to get to the point where we can use the media room, and if I remember correctly, the original budget was $1500. So I barely stepped over budget, but that's ok. It was worth it.

So now that we have everything set up, come back for Part 6 and see how it looks!
http://kriskramer-mediaroom.blogspot.com/2008/06/media-room-walkthrough-part-6.html

Media Room walkthrough - Part 4

Step 5 - Speakers/Receiver

The lights are hung, the paint is dry, and the screen is mounted. Time for a break, right?

Wrong! We're just getting started.

Up next for our intrepid media room team (i.e., me, with the occasional assist from my parents) is setting up the speakers and the receiver. Now, here's where the cost calculations get tricky. I already had a 5.1 surround sound system that was several years old, but it still worked fine, and would have worked great for this setup. That means technically it didn't need to count against my budget.

However, not everyone has a 5.1 surround sound system, and to be honest, I ended up buying a new receiver anyway, so I'm going to add the cost of the system to our tally simply because it's an expected cost for something like this.

Now I got lucky, I bought the base model Onkyo receiver at Fry's for around $220. It supports 7.1 surround sound, and has HDMI pass through, which means you can plug in two HDMI cables from input sources, i.e. my XBox, and potentially a PS3 for the Blu-Ray drive, and output it from one port to the display, in this case a projector. So it's basically an HDMI switch.

I also already had the speakers, so my only expense was $220. In reality, a bare bones surround sound system would start at around $300, and the top of the line systems easily go over $1000. So for me, this added $220. For someone with no speakers or surround sound system, I'd budget at least $400 for a worthwhile system.

So let's get to this. In the pic below is a TV stand I bought at Target for $40. It's simple, effective, and black, so it doesn't stand out much in a dark room. Well, except for the shiny metal poles, obviously... oh well. Like I said, it was $40.


Here's a pic of the XBox from above. I ended up buying the wireless router since I didn't want to run a 50ft long ethernet cable from my router upstairs to the XBox downstairs. That cost me another $100, but that's not necessarily a cost for most people.

Here's the XBox from the front.

Here's the 'new' receiver, with 7.1 surround and HDMI pass through. It's an Onkyo TX-SR575, but I think that model is now being phased out for a newer one that's about $100 more. The one you see here was actually the display model.


Here's the old receiver. Still works fine, just needs speakers.


Ok, now let's talk about the speakers. In the pic below is the center speaker, mounted (well, in this case just sitting) on the top of the TV stand.

Here's one of the rear speakers, the rear right to be specific. It's mounted to the ceiling, and yeah the speaker wire is just hanging down for now. Eventually I'll need to figure out a solution for the wires, but that's for another day and another post.


Here's the front right speaker, in a lopsided pic. You can also see the subwoofer there on the floor.

The front left speaker.

Here's the back of the front left speaker. Now I ended up buying the speaker stands, including the mounts for the back speakers, for about $30 at Circuit City. They had one box left on clearance and I grabbed it. Go me!

You can see in the pic that it just screws directly into the back of the speaker, and the wire actually runs into a hole at the top of the mount, down through the metal rod, and comes out below, under the actual stand.

Here's another pic of the rear left speaker. It's hanging a little lower than it needs to, but I adjusted it later.

And the rear left speaker from the front. I used the staple gun from the screen to hang up the wire.
So there we go. Speakers are hung and receiver is set up. Now, here's the cost breakdown:

$40 TV stand
$220 Receiver
$100 XBox wireless router
$30 Speaker stands and mounts

so $390 for all that, which ends up being what I estimated the cost being for a new surround sound system for someone that doesn't have one. To make this easier, I'm rounding everything up to partly account for taxes. So $400 for this, and let's say $200 already spent.

So running tally is approx $600.

Up next, the fun stuff!

http://kriskramer-mediaroom.blogspot.com/2008/06/media-room-walkthrough-part-5.html

Media Room walkthrough - Part 3

Step 4 - The Screen

We've done the lights, and the painting, so now we need to make the actual movie screen. I did mine similar to my friend Jared's original screen, which means I made it from wood and wrapped it in Black out cloth.

As you'll see from the pics below, it's a simple wood frame, with two vertical cross beams. I used 4 pieces of 8ft pieces of wood from Home Depot, each about $4. NOTE: It's very important to buy wood that isn't warped or bent.

Here's the frame laying on the black out cloth, which I'll get to in a minute.

Here's one of the vertical cross supports. Basically, I took two of the 8ft pieces and cut them in half. Two became the outer edges of the frame, and the other two became the vertical supports, held together below by a metal T joint and screws.

And here's the corner joint, using a metal L joint.

Now the boards themselves were about an inch and a half, which makes the dimensions of the screen approx 96" by 51" which is around 108" diagonal viewing area.

The next step is to get black out cloth. Black out cloth (BOC) is avaibable at most fabric stores, like Joann's or something. It's basically the thick stuff you can get as a liner for curtains. I discovered this because everyone I talked to at Joann's in Frisco, where I got my BOC, asked me if I was making curtains. It's totally opaque, so no light gets through it, and some types of BOC is stretchy and a little reflective, which means you can wrap it around a wooden frame to make a screen. Well, it turns out that I had a wooden frame, so hey, let's buy some BOC and make a screen!

BOC, like most fabric, comes in a standard width of 54". You can special order different widths, but that takes time, and sometimes it takes more money, so I just stuck with the standard stuff. You'll remember that my frame is 51" tall, which means the 54" width of BOC would give me 3" of leeway. That's actually plenty, even though it sounds small, since we'll be stretching it around the frame. So I bought 3 yards (9 feet) of BOC, which would give me 3" of leeway top to bottom, and a foot of leeway left to right, since the frame was 8 feet wide.

The pics above showed the frame laying on the BOC, which at the time looks like a white bedsheet. The BOC I ended up buying had one side that was a little shinier, and thus more reflective, than the other, so I had that side down. I also made sure to vacuum the floor where I was doing this, to keep dog hair, dust and other stuff off of the screen. I also layed it down on another 'actual' bed sheet, to help keep it clean.

To get the BOC onto the frame, I used staples. In the pics below you'll see the staple gun and staples that I borrowed from Jared, and that I used to actually staple the BOC on to the frame.

Now this part is a little tricky, and it's also something you'll want to do with a friend. I ended up doing it solo, which makes it about FIFTY times harder, but it's still doable, just not recommended. The trick is to line up the BOC on the frame, and put in a few 'guide' staples. What I did was put one staple on each edge, just to keep the BOC connected to the frame as I flipped it around. After that, I added a few more staples, stretching the BOC each time. The goal is to stretch the BOC about as tight as you possibly can around the frame so you can't see any wrinkles on the screen. It should be flat, tight and smooth.

The reason this is best done with extra people, is because you'll need them to pull the BOC tight as you staple it around the frame. Otherwise, you're pulling with one hand, stapling with another, and somehow using your body to keep everything else stable and in place. Like I said, you can do it, it's just a lot easier with help.

A trick I heard about from Jared was to go around the frame clock-wise (or counterclock-wise?) because that helps keep the BOC from bunching. If you try to do it top to bottom and then left to right, the sides that get done first will get bunched around the edges because you'll end up being able to pull tighter on the sides you do last. So if you just go around the edges, one side at a time, in a circle, you can minimize that issue.

Here's some pics of the screen after I got it stapled down. Here's an edge-on view showing the staples.

And another one.

Here it is leaning against the wall, in a 'bad boy' pose.

Here's the one and only 'bunch' in the fabric I had. Easily fixed by pulling at the bottom and putting in another staple or two.
And here's the screen after it's been hung. The frame by itself is pretty light, maybe a few pounds or so. The BOC probably triples that weight, so the screen is probably in the 10-15 pound range I'm guessing. It's too heavy for just a nail to hang on, so you'll have to get the screws that push in, then screw out and use that bent metal to clamp from the inside. I'm sure there's a technical term for them, I just don't know what that is at the moment. I also don't have pics, but I can provide specifics on what I used later if people need to know.

This is where my dad and I scratched the wall when trying to hang the screen. Touch up painting, here we come.

Here's a side view. Notice anything weird?

If you didn't, I'll go ahead and tell you what's wrong. Look at the bottom right corner. It's not easy to see in that pic, but it sticks out more than the others do. It's warped at that corner, and that's from the fabric pulling on the frame so tight that it curves the wood frame there. It only sticks out about 2 inches, and that's easily fixable by nailing it down. One of the staples on that corner isn't all the way in, so I can just stick a nail through there and that will fix the problem. But I just wanted to illustrate one of the problems of building your own screen.

Some additional notes: It's probably best to NOT hang the screen until after the projector is hung/mounted. I got lucky, and mine turned out to be in a good spot, but I'd recommend waiting until you have the projector to make sure you have it exactly where you want it.

Also, at some time in the future I'm going to get some black felt, mount it to cardboard, or some other hard backing, and use it to create a border around the edges of the screen. That serves to cover up the staples around the edges of the screen, and also blocks out the white spaces around the edges, letting you adjust the border in to exactly fit the image size. I don't have it up yet, but I'll post pics once I get that done, so you can better understand what I'm talking about (for those of you who AREN'T already videophiles).

So what's the new tally? Well, the wood was around $16, and the L and T brackets, plus screws, added I think another $10. I forget exactly how much the BOC was the first time I went to Joann's, but I went back to get more to cover some windows and it was around $5/yd at the time, so we'll use that price. So 3 yards = $15, plus $26 = $41 to make a 108" screen. So the current total is what... $176?

Next, we'll talk about speakers.

http://kriskramer-mediaroom.blogspot.com/2008/06/step-5-speakersreceiver-lights-are-hung.html

Media Room walkthrough - Part 2

Step 3 - Painting

Now, one of the first things they teach you in Media Room Crafting 101 is that your media room should be dark, REALLY dark. The goal is to keep light from reflecting off of any other surface in the room other than the screen, to avoid washing it out. A media room has a singular goal, and that's to focus people on the media. In this case, it will be on a big screen, which we want people to be able to see. So... we're painting the room dark. And the color, as mentioned earlier, was inspired by a rug that I already had.

So let's get started. First, the dining room had molding, on the floor, the ceiling and a middle section right on the screen wall. So we had to tape everything up with the blue painters tape you get at Home Depot. Following are a few fascinating pics of just that...

Here's the tape covering the molding that is right in the middle of the wall where the screen will be.


The crown molding.


The dimmer switch installed previously.


And the dog, who's wondering what I'm up to... and why he's not allowed within a 10ft radius of the room.

The paint is Valspar, from Lowe's. It's a flat paint, which means it's a low gloss, although technically it's not zero gloss. I learned recently that paints have a gloss value from 0 to 100, and that 'flat' isn't 0, it's actually something like 5 on the glossy scale. You can get paint with 0 gloss at Sherwin-Williams or something, but I wasn't too worried about it, so I just bought regular flat paint from Lowe's.

The exact color I can look up later if anyone really wants it, but it's basically a deep burgundy color. You can get a good look at it here, as well where some of it chipped off when removing the tape:

Here's a sideways pic of the mid wall in-progress during the painting. You can see that after only one coat of this stuff, it looks really streaky and splotchy. You almost HAVE to put two or three coats to get it to look right. And that's pretty much what we ended up doing.

Here's the top corner, where I needed a stool and a tiny paintbrush to really get in there and finish it off. By the way, my mom helped me do a lot of the painting, but she did it for free so I don't have to include it as an expenditure. :)

The dimmer switch, post-painting. Again, the paint chipped off when removing the tape, requiring a lot of touch up. The lesson with this stuff is don't leave the tape on too long.

Here's the plastic drop sheet and the step stool we used to reach the high parts.

And finally, after a few coats, and two gallons of paint, the room is done... or at least it looks good enough to call it done for now.

Here's the main wall, as seen from the foyer:

And again from in the middle of the room. Notice all the light that gets to that wall from the window to the right and the foyer area on the left.... but we'll deal with that later.

The other end of the room.

And a couple pics of the side, with everything back where it was and hung up.

And one more pic of the screen wall. You can see the track lights at the top, and the Rock Back drums at the bottom right.

And the dog... still wondering what's going on, and why he can't drink the paint.

So, what's the current tally? Well, two gallons of paint, at $30 each, plus approximately $25 in supplies (roller, drop sheets, bin, brush, tape, etc.), brings us to $85 for the painting, plus the $50 for the lights, so a total of $135 so far.

Not bad.

Up next? The screen.

http://kriskramer-mediaroom.blogspot.com/2008/05/media-room-walkthrough-part-3.html