Making the "Bacon Race" Theater - Page 36

That idea hasn't died. In fact I've been trying to remind myself of that a few times now as I still have a lot of interest in doing that.

LOL it's not quite like that. She only turned up the temp because of all the people at the house we would end up using that room. I've looked a bunch more into these this afternoon and a cheap thermostat by Radio Thermostat would be great, and I could use my andriod phone to adjust the fan or temps from the movie room over my home wifi network. Perfect!

There was one earlier in the thread where the entire thermostat moved around, thus the temp would be detected from wherever the controller was.
http://www.smarthome.com/30403A/Vens...-Rewire/p.aspx

Either way, i'd be able to adjust the temp from the movie room. I think i'd have to buy 2 of the controllers for the latter choice though, since I'd likely leave the thermostat in the movie room and drive my wife nuts when there is no way to adjust the temp from the sunroom

Correct. I initially was going to go with a dead vent to my rec room in the basement, which was immediately shelved by the wife. (Mostly because she had no idea what she was talking about). The rec room is a very large space directly adjacent to the theater which is always cool.

I could easily convert my two ducting inlet/outlets to this using the storage room's air, since the supply and return ducting is accessible near the 3rd zone A/C unit in the unfinished storage area, but I don't think it would work very well to that room since it isn't very big and doesn't have a lot of air to move.

The current setup shouldn't be an issue most of the year due to the fact that i can just turn on the A/C. It's just in winter that I can't really do that. And as long as the heat is set to a reasonably low temp for that one zone (like 66) and I have the fan in on-mode while watching a movie, it stays comfortable in the room. It's just when the thermostat is set to like 70 and in normal operation (Not in fan-on mode, just standard auto). When you first walk into the theater it is super warm and takes a bit of time to cool off due to all of the insulation.

Carb - I was considering this mini-split
http://www.thermospace.com/ductless_...mini-split.php

Mostly due to the fact that it has a 20 seer rating, a sanyo compressior unit, and can run as an A/C unit all through winter. All of the cooling things are exactly what I want. The cons however are: Looks (Nice white unit on my red/black walls) and Noise (it will add noise to the theater room when it is running) After spending so much time on the project, those are two big cons though. On that particular mini-split, the plastic case is pretty angular and plain, so it would probably be easily paintable to match the room.

It's not really that expensive, comes with everything I need to install it, and wouldn't require any major modifications to my finished theater space other than drilling a hole for the tubes.

I love the lighting in the theater. The lights in the soffit are more than enough for the seating. In fact I like it much better than standard recessed lighting.

Plus the lights I have are all on a dimmer, so I can make them dim enough to not wash out the projector but light enough to see. Less lights are better if you have the projector on. For a movie room, I can't see myself ever watching TV with it actually "Bright".

There are 4 zones. The sides/back, the stage lights, the rope lights, and the step lights.

By the way, if anyone knows someone I could call to come to my house in the NOVA area and calibrate my projector, I'd appreciate it!

Well for instance when BIG and I were originally looking at Ruben's (Sandman/SMX) theater, I said I really liked the soffit and light tray and wanted to do something like that. When it came time to actually building it we really started to wonder how the two connected together. There were never any pictures of how he did it. So we had to come up with something. It's fine to make something in 3D and not know how you will do it until it comes time to do it. Anything can be done as long as you stop to figure out the details at some point.

I'll try to get some more pictures for you soon.

The screen is 130" wide. So that would be 141.3" diagonal for scope.

I haven't forgotten about your questions. I'll get some pictures this weekend and take a measurement from both rows of seating.

Also, I might finally be putting up the primer on the outside of my theater door haha.

As for viewing distances, and this is a very quick estimated measurement. The front row is just over 12 feet, and the rear row is about 18 feet.

The distance from the lens to the projector is probably around 15 feet 8 inches give or take a few inches.

Here is a photo to put the projector distance in perspective as requested.

As far as the acoustic plan, here is the last copy I sent. The only difference here is that we changed the side wall acoustical treatments to 1" and the rear wall 4". This is what Bryan wanted to do, but I told him I would rather not do 4" in the back... which I changed my mind on in the end, and am very happy I did so.

So if the seats in the front row are not reclined AND the seats in the back row are reclined, then the tops of the seats in the front row are in the way a little. It's not that the back riser was not tall enough, it was more that the screen might have been mounted a little higher. It's not a big deal really as I much prefer the view from the front row. Total submersion. I think people have had the seats reclined in every single movie we have watched, at least part way.

Also, the projector is not hung with the top of the screen material. At first it was a problem. The first projector pipe I had I believe was 6" and although the scope screen got filled completely, when the projector zoomed out and tried to position the 16:9 image, it wouldn't shift down far enough. So we went to the store. We went to a 10" drop pipe (to go with the ceiling mount and the mount plate) and then it fit the screen in both modes. We asked for a custom length at home depot, but cutting a 10" pipe was tricky as the length wasn't long enough to get locked into the pipe cutter on both ends. They got it done though. We could have just purchased a stock 12" pipe, but now the height of the projector was starting to become a problem for the rear row. As of right now it is just about 6 feet or so from the top of the riser to the bottom (which is the top flipped) of the projector, so 2 more inches would cause a lot of bumping. People still need to be a litlle careful when getting up and sitting down in the rear seats.

The projector would have needed to be moved either closer (above the front row) or further (against the light tray) to have the clearance problems avoided, but then forward-wize it wouldnt be far enough to fill the screen, and then back wise it would lose some brightness and look weird.

I like how everything is right now, but yes, if I was building it all again from scratch these are the things I'd do differently:

1) Mount the screen a couple of inches higher.
2) Test my HDMI cables before putting them through the conduit!!!
3) Make sure the height of the door threshold was greater than the thickness of my carpet!
4) Add a dead-vent and another vent register (2 instead of 1) or a mini-split
5) Do a better calculation on my fabric and cotton (My black fabric estimate was perfect but I had quite a bit left over red fabric and several boxes of cotton left over)
6) Get the paint right the first time (Make sure to do the fabric matching at the store instead of eyeball matching)
7) Give a little more extra space for columns so that the middle parts aren't so tightly wedged in. (Cut off 1/2" at least from each of them and measure three times)
8) I would have used Roman for my chairs and NOT under any circumstances, theaterseatstore. By the way, I FINALLY got my replacement chair for the wrong order yesterday... January 16th, after the original guy who was dragging his feet got fired and a new guy finally sorted it out. You do the math of how many months that was.

Things I'm VERY happy I did
1) Use BIGmouthinDC for help
2) chose the sony projector
3) got my acoustic treatments from Bryan Pape
4) Contacted Ruben for my SMX screen
5) Read build threads I liked at least 3 times from beginning to end for ideas, measurements, and other builder's experiences
6) Room de-coupling
7) Moved all of my blu ray ISO files to MKV and used MediaBrowser. Everyone loves my movie setup now and is amazed how it works.
8) Used unRaid for my media NAS. Great stable no-maintenance system!
9) lived close a a home depot/lowes
10) Used places like monoprice for most of my cables. Great quality and so cheap. Do research!

Though to be honest, this build went VERY well. BIG and I were able to make decisions together very quickly, we caught each other's mistakes almost 99% of the time, and had very few "Re-Do" moments. The theater was finished in record time and it is exactly what I hoped it would look/sound like. Really the only thing I mulled over at the end having a slight regret on was not putting more effort into calculating BTU/cooling etc. I like my rooms (and the air I breathe) cold, that's what blankets are for, so for me I think I could have done that better. Everything else, well... I couldn't be happier!