How about recreating a similar Cinerama five-screen…

[JBL4645]

…in the living room with (2001 A Space Odyssey)!

The cost will be an enormous factor due to the use of three matching LCD video projectors, hence bulb life for each of the projectors.

The way I looked at it with taking the image and sending it to three projectors at the same time, with several modifications per projector to allow the user to exploit the height and slight narrow width of the three separate projected images.

One you’ll need to make a custom like aperture plate to purposely crop-off or frame parts of the image in similar manor to Cinerama.

The reason of sending the same image at three projectors at the same time, is to insure the image is in sync as you want be using three bluray players and three of the same disc title where one might go slightly out of sync.

Each of the projectors would need to be angled for the left and right side image.

Left for right side of the screen
Right for left side of the screen
Centre for the centre portion of the screen

The screen itself would needed to be deep curved extending around the front and bending slightly to give that Cinerama look.

Where should the aperture plate be fitted?

Its obvious it would have to go between the LCD and the lens from in the inside of the projector and be easy to remove as well. So this means you’ll lose your warranty because the projector has been modified.

The cutting of the plate would have to high precision to cut-off the sides around roughly 33%? So you’ll have (33% for left 33% for centre and 33% for left) that’s just a rough idea guess.

That’s more or less the principle of it the rest is just hard work knocking it all together.

The five screen original approach, well since the film doesn’t retain its original mix and the only mix that is close is a region 1 first edition DVD, that should be close to the later laserdisc version that has all this wild, wild crazy dialogue panning.

Large proportions of the dialogue panning have been centralized so this version is far from what you, heard in 70mm Cinerama, sorry to bust you’re bumble.

If it did have the original mix which wouldn’t be hard at all, its just sheer lazy idleness in producing an fast copy that was produced for the year (2001 release on DVD).

Anyway if you used two matching matrix Dolby pro-logic decoders and matching fronts is paramount unless you want to spend the best part of year mucking around and tweaking the EQ to get those mismatched fronts to sound tonally correct.

The purpose of decoders is to strip (centre phantom half from left and centre) so that you have solid sound placed in-between the (left and centre and centre and right fronts)

Basically

1 Left
2 Left-centre
3 Centre
4 Right-centre
5 Right

Sound will be detected and positioned roughly where the performers are located on the screen providing of coarse the speakers are aligned correctly behind the screen.

A simple bypass of the Dolby decoders will send the sound back to left and right. Also it frees up the centre from a few overlapping sounds, kinder like anti-phase it strips it free making for different centre channel sound same with left and right.

There, there’s your early Christmas present.