news-blog

CEDIA 2011 Awards Shortlist Announced

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 09:55:54 +0100

CEDIA Region 1 is proud to announce the short list for the CEDIA Awards 2011. From English country homes to stunning superyachts sailing the world and private villas in Arabia and Africa, this year’s short list celebrates the best residential custom installation projects with a heady mixture of excellence touched by the exotic.

Sponsors so far confirmed for this years event are AWE, CP Sport, Loewe, Panasonic, and Philips Dynalite.

“We are delighted with the high standard of entries in this year’s Awards which has proved a major challenge for our judges in the short-listing process” says Robert Hallam, CEDIA Chairman and Chair of Judges. “We are also really pleased to see integrators from across the Region participating in the scheme. A total of 10 different countries have competed in the scheme this year with entries from the UK, Netherlands, Cyprus, Portugal, South Africa, UAE, Italy, Belgium, Denmark and France, helping to increase awards entries by 16% on 2010. The Awards provide a great showcase for our industry, and this year the breadth, depth and quality of integration and innovation is as impressive as ever”.

All winners of the Awards will be announced on Friday 8th April 2011 at a Gala Dinner held at the prestigious Grade 1 listed venue, One Mayfair. More than 250 guests from across the Region are expected to attend. Tickets for the event, which includes a sit down dinner and entertainment, are priced at £110 per person, or £995 for a table of ten, excluding VAT. A special early bird discount is available until 28 February 2011. Before this date, tickets are priced £99 per person and £895 for a table of ten.

To take advantage of the early bird rate visit the 'Events' section on the CEDIA website to book your ticket(s), by clickinghere.

The shortlist for the CEDIA Awards 2011, by category, is as follows:

Best Media Room under £15,000

Adept-is, Hutchinson’s Home

Clever Association, Pannal Hall

Dawsons Group, Integrated Media Room

De Opera Domotica, Kid friendly Media Room

ImagineThis, Family Zone

Best Media Room over £15,000

Elytronic, City Centre Penthouse

Grahams Hi-Fi, ‘The Popes House'

Olive AV, The Art House

Sensory International, The Playroom

Best Home Cinema under £40,000

Dawsons Group, Loft Space Cinema

The Big Picture Ltd, Longwood House, The Junk Room

Best Home Cinema £40,000 - £100,000

Definitions Ltd, Sporting Life

FAB AV, Lofty Ambitions

Prestige Audio, Northwood Home Cinema

Best Home Cinema over £100,000

Dawsons Group, Country Home Cinema

FAB AV, Arabian Nights

Sphere Custom, House Khoury

Best Integrated Home under £30,000

Clever Association, Pannal Hall

Dawsons Group, Integrated Multi Room System

Elytronic, Hi-Tech Renovation

Best Integrated Home £30,000 - £100,000

De Opera Domotica, Modern Home

Elytronic, City Centre Penthouse

SMC, Chelsea Family Home

Best Integrated Home over £100,000

Federal Technologies, Private Villa

Grahams Hi-Fi, ‘The Popes House'

Henri, Villa des Amis

I-Life Solutions, Brantingham – 20,000 sq ft family home

SMC, Elysium House

Best Innovative Solution

MR Domotica, Custom-build motorised hidden television

Best Multi-dwelling

SMC, The Lancasters

Best Marine

Dawsons Group, 88 Yacht

Dawsons Group, Sunseeker 40m 516 Upgrade

Sensory International, MY Cloud 9

Studio LGL, Yacht 1

Best Dressed

Adept-is, Hutchinson’s Home

Lewis Building Technology, Integrated home automation and security

5 Reasons to use Screen Excellence Acoustically Transparent screens

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 09:16:48 +0100

1) All commercial theatres use an Acoustically Transparent screen with three front loudspeakers placed behind it. All cinematic studios monitor loudspeakers are installed the same way. The sound is recorded as it is intended to be played back.

2) When you see the image of an actor speaking on the screen, you expect the sound to come from the actors’ mouth, not from somewhere below or above the screen.

The whole theatrical experience relies on the “suspension of disbelief”. Sight and hearing are, for most of us, reliable perceptions. Displaying a visual image coincident with the corresponding sound has a tremendous power to create the illusion of reality.

If the sound and the image are not merged together both in time (lip-sync) and in space (speaker location) this illusion is broken.

Since the early days of talking movies the cinema industry has used Acoustically Transparent screens to give the best illusion and involvement.

3) When the image of a sounding object is travelling from, say, left to right of the screen, the sound is supposed to follow the same path.

Here is what is supposed to happen, and how the sound engineer designed it.

And there is what actually happens with a solid screen:When the sound source crosses the screen, it dips as it nears the centre instead of faithfully following the path of the source.

This effect is quite funny (even ludicrous !), but it inevitably makes you lose the illusion of reality:

You immediately realize that you are not in the action, but watching a movie played back by a system that has its (serious) inherent flaws.

4) Acoustically transparent screens allow you to place the centre channel at ear level and to get the best fidelity avoiding nasty short path-length reflections.

5) Just think it’s one or three less loudspeaker(s) for your wife/girlfriend/interior designer to ’admire’ !

6) *This is a bonus reason - but a major one at that - the screen can be larger. Using an A/T screen allows you to have the best of both worlds when it comes to positioning the speakers vs screen size whilst using a reference speaker layout as adhered to by Dolby and DTS certified studios. As the screens from Screen Excellence offer so little interference with the sound (flat 2dB attenuation across the spectrum) they're a match made in heaven for a Studio engineer. Now why shouldn't we be allowed the same professional standards at home?

Don’t just take our word for it ! Try the comparison yourself.

·Select good quality program with a singer or a close speech. Avoid dubbed soundtracks.

·Ensure delays are correctly set to give proper lip-sync and get the best result.

·Use a system with an Acoustically Transparent screen and two centre speakers, one below the screen and the other centrally positioned behind the screen.

·Then playback dialogue scenes and switch from one centre speaker to the other.

Our dealers and installers should be able to organize this test for comparison, and if not then you're more than welcome to run the tests here with us in our showrooms and make a decision on which system gives the most involvement and dramatic impact!

Seeing is believing.

Why 3D doesn’t work and never will. Case closed.

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 09:23:54 +0100

An interesting Article by Roger Ebert about 3D technology. With 3D becoming more and more prevalent and more dealers wanting products which support it (and thankfully all of ours do) this is an interesting perspective. Whilst we remain neutral regarding the technology so far, we're always keeping a close eye on where the road may take us, and this is just one of the many discussions we've come across.

"I received a letter that ends, as far as I am concerned, the discussion about 3D. It doesn't work with our brains and it never will.

The notion that we are asked to pay a premium to witness an inferior and inherently brain-confusing image is outrageous. The case is closed.

This letter is from Walter Murch, seen at left, the most respected film editor and sound designer in the modern cinema. As a editor, he must be intimately expert with how an image interacts with the audience’s eyes. He won an Academy Award in 1979 for his work on “Apocalypse Now,” whose sound was a crucial aspect of its effect.

Wikipedia writes: “Murch is widely acknowledged as the person who coined the term Sound Designer, and along with colleagues developed the current standard film sound format, the 5.1 channel array, helping to elevate the art and impact of film sound to a new level. “Apocalypse Now” was the first multi-channel film to be mixed using a computerized mixing board.” He won two more Oscars for the editing and sound mixing of “The English Patient.”

“He is perhaps the only film editor in history,” the Wikipedia entry observes, “to have received Academy nominations for films edited on four different systems:

• “Julia” (1977) using upright Moviola

• ”Apocalypse Now” (1979), “Ghost” (1990), and “The Godfather, Part III” (1990) using KEM flatbed

• “The English Patient” (1996) using Avid.

• “Cold Mountain” (2003) using Final Cut Pro on an off-the shelf PowerMac G4.Now read what Walter Murch says about 3D:

Hello Roger,

I read your review of “Green Hornet” and though I haven’t seen the film, I agree with your comments about 3D.

The 3D image is dark, as you mentioned (about a camera stop darker) and small. Somehow the glasses “gather in” the image — even on a huge Imax screen — and make it seem half the scope of the same image when looked at without the glasses.

I edited one 3D film back in the 1980′s — “Captain Eo” — and also noticed that horizontal movement will strobe much sooner in 3D than it does in 2D. This was true then, and it is still true now. It has something to do with the amount of brain power dedicated to studying the edges of things. The more conscious we are of edges, the earlier strobing kicks in.

The biggest problem with 3D, though, is the “convergence/focus” issue. A couple of the other issues — darkness and “smallness” — are at least theoretically solvable. But the deeper problem is that the audience must focus their eyes at the plane of the screen — say it is 80 feet away. This is constant no matter what.

But their eyes must converge at perhaps 10 feet away, then 60 feet, then 120 feet, and so on, depending on what the illusion is. So 3D films require us to focus at one distance and converge at another. And 600 million years of evolution has never presented this problem before. All living things with eyes have always focussed and converged at the same point. .

If we look at the salt shaker on the table, close to us, we focus at six feet and our eyeballs converge (tilt in) at six feet. Imagine the base of a triangle between your eyes and the apex of the triangle resting on the thing you are looking at. But then look out the window and you focus at sixty feet and converge also at sixty feet. That imaginary triangle has now “opened up” so that your lines of sight are almost — almost — parallel to each other.

We can do this. 3D films would not work if we couldn't. But it is like tapping your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time, difficult. So the “CPU” of our perceptual brain has to work extra hard, which is why after 20 minutes or so many people get headaches. They are doing something that 600 million years of evolution never prepared them for. This is a deep problem, which no amount of technical tweaking can fix. Nothing will fix it short of producing true “holographic” images.

Consequently, the editing of 3D films cannot be as rapid as for 2D films, because of this shifting of convergence: it takes a number of milliseconds for the brain/eye to “get” what the space of each shot is and adjust.

And lastly, the question of immersion. 3D films remind the audience that they are in a certain “perspective” relationship to the image. It is almost a Brechtian trick. Whereas if the film story has really gripped an audience they are “in” the picture in a kind of dreamlike “spaceless” space. So a good story will give you more dimensionality than you can ever cope with.

So: dark, small, stroby, headache inducing, alienating. And expensive. The question is: how long will it take people to realize and get fed up?

All best wishes,

Walter Murch

Salt shaker and landscape Photoshops by Marie Haws.