Monty's Projector Calculation Cheat Sheet: Quickly determine the throw distance, brightness, lens, and image size you need

[mc_monte]

Many of us have used the projection calculators over at Projector Central.

However, I wanted to create a sheet where I could fill in some values that mattered to me and get some quick numbers, as personally, projector central doesn't really paint a complete picture of everything we usually need to consider in theatre and installation.

So I created my own projection cheat sheet in Google Docs. You can view it via the link, and save it to your own Google Drive to make edits of your own.

The goal of this sheet is to help accurately and quickly determine the throw distance, lens, image size, and expected brightness of a projection screen. This helps out the "napkin math" we so often need to perform, but it does not to provide a comprehensive picture. This is not a substitute for drafting or creating a real projection plot -- but over the years I've found being able to throw down some quick numbers in a design pitch or production meeting to be invaluable. It's also useful when researching projectors, since you can plug in the values you *actually need* and find a projector that meets those standards, rather than playing a guessing game with projector specs.

The sheet is very easy to use. Simply fill in all the information you know in the BLUE fields. If you are missing a piece of information, you can leave it blank. 

The GREEN field display the results based on the information you provide. Then you can go back and edit the BLUE fields to fill in any unknowns.

I hope this is useful! I would love any feedback or suggestions for how it can be improved.

[CitizenJoe]

Monty, that looks awesome! I tried to play with it, but I appear to be in "View Only" mode.

Cheers,

Hugh

[mark_m]

@citizenjoe

You have to save it to your own computer before you can edit it.

When you click the link it opens in docs.google.com. Go file -> download as... and save it to your HDD in your favoured format

[bonemap]

@mc_monte

Thanks for sharing!

[Skulpture]

Thanks Monty!