I'm going to need some immediate help! But first a bit of background - We are putting an addition (bedroom, bath, and theater) on to my father-in-law's house north of Phoenix. We live in MA and won't be moving down for maybe 1 1/2 years.

I am in Phoenix for the week trying to get a few things in place before it's too late. I have been able to run wires for 7.2, cable and Cat 5. The theater's dimensions are 13' 4" x 23' 7" x 8'. They are coming tomorrow to finish the drywall and I need set up placement of the projector. Have absolutely no clue on what model of projector (it will be 1080p) or screen I will eventually buy and having no experience with projection, I am banking on the good graces of those here. I did the tape over the insulation thing to figure out the size of screen (16:9, 120" diag) and roughly figured the front row of seats at 14'.

My basic questions are how far back should I make provisions for mounting the projector?

Besides power and an HDMI cable, what other connections for the projector should I plan for. I have some 2" conduit that I could install. Does it make sense to do this?

If I decided down the road to go to a 2.35 aspect ratio screen, would that materially affect the projector mount position? Thanks in advance.

The easiest thing at this point is to not plan a specific location but rather a range of locations running down the center of the theater. Put up your conduit, insert projector cables. Put up a run of ROMEX for the power but leave it all above the drywall. Then once you select a projector and know the exact preferred location you cut some small access holes in the ceiling cut the conduit to the right length pull the cables to the correct location and use old work boxes to finish off the access holes.

I agree with bigmouth. In general, you are going to want your projector 10-15' from the front wall, mounted on the ceiling.

You may have code problems leaving romex in the wall that doesn't come out (if code/inspections is an issue). In that case, run the romex from the back of the room, up the middle of the room, to a box at ~12' from the screen. Leave it stubbed off in the box. If you can, skip the wire staples between that box and 18' from the screen. Just cover that box with a blank plate.

Once you figure out where your projector will be, you can cut a small drywall hole, grab the romex, and pull it out of the dummy box. Install an old-work box where you want it and you are good to go.

Getting the HDMI and component cables there from your rack is more complicated if you don't know quite where it will be. For now, run flex conduit down the middle of your room from your rack (big enough to allow pulling an hdmi cable). You can then do something comparable to the romex work above.

A better option would be to pick a projector or two now and figure out where you'd want to place them. Go to projectorcentral.com and use their calculator to get a good idea. With a Sony vw60, or a JVC rs1x, 13' seems to be a good, close, bright spot. I assume that is lens distance, so wires should come out a bit behind that.

Conduit (3") down the center line of the room is your best bet for now. Other than video signals and power, you'll need control of some sort (IR, RS-232, IP?) and perhaps wire for triggering devices when the projector is powered on/off.

Do not run your romex in the conduit with your signal wire...keep it at least 6" away.