Audio Video News

Last week, Home Theater editor Shane Buettner, UAV editor Scott Wilkinson, and I visited the Hollywood facilities of The Best Practices Laboratory. BPL is an independent technology laboratory located at the historic Raleigh Studios. Established under a different name in 1915 (it became Raleigh in 1980), Raleigh today is primarily dedicated to the production of independent films, commercials, and TV shows. (When we were there they were filming The Closer, Private Practice, and Castle.)

In 2005, THX and Microsoft set up a combined operation at Raleigh Studios to promote Windows Media Center and VC-1, the video compression used on HD DVD. When that format went south, the operation was nearly closed. But in 2008, David Haines took over the facility and founded BPL.

BPL's offices are located in a "bungalow row," a two- story complex just down the street from Paramount Pictures. These "bungalows" are updated versions of the type seen in numerous old Hollywood movies about the movies, where studio writers were chained to their typewriters, furiously churning out pages for that day's shooting schedule. Raleigh's bungalows date back to the studio's early days. Charlie Chaplin had his offices there and produced many of his films on site.

BPL's mission is to provide facilities where companies developing new technologies for the creation, distribution, and exhibition of entertainment content can showcase those technologies in a neutral environment to potential clients. It offers training and conference rooms, fiber optic links to soundstages, and access to three different screening rooms with 36, 38, and 160 seats. There is also a small home-theater room, shown above. It's currently equipped with a plasma display and a modest audio system, with plans for significant future upgrades.

In addition, BPL helps to organize and sponsor education in entertainment technologies and one-day conferences, covering topics such as digital cinema, Internet HD, and advances in digital motion capture.

Of major interest to us, of course, were the screening rooms. We visited the 36- and 38-seat facilities, each equipped with film projectors and Wolf Cinema DCX video projectors. The screens in both are Stewart Studiotek 100s, and both are microperfed. Wolf (which had set up our visit) sells its DLP video projectors into the high-end home theater market. The projectors are big enough and loud enough to really demand a separate projection room, and that's what they had here.

Even high-end home theaters don't often install this many seats, but apart from that, both of these theaters aren't all that different in size from a large home-theater room. With their crisp, no-nonsense layout, the Raleigh theaters are less about what the rooms looks like with the lights on than what the movies look like with the lights off.

And with Wolf projectors filling both the 13-foot (wide) screen in the 36-seat room (a Wolf DSX-1000) and a 17-footer in the 38-seat room (a Wolf DSX-1500), the images were stunningly bright, colorful, and detailed. We were treated to demo scenes from several commercial Blu-rays, including Speed Racer and Casino Royale in the "small" room and Patton and How The West Was Won in the larger space. Yes, Speed Racer is essentially a cartoon, and Patton has seen more than its share of criticism for heavy-handed noise reduction, but even taking those things into account, they looked very impressive here. I was also amazed at how well the nearly 50-year-old How the West Was Won held up on the big screen (we watched the regular HD version, not the "Smilebox" transfer).

My only reservation involved a limitation common to all 3-chip DLP digital-cinema projectors I've seen—merely so-so black levels. (Wolf projectors are based on commercial designs.) This shortcoming was only visible in fades between scenes on the material we were shown, and it might be possible to improve the result with setup changes.

The visit ended with a delicious lunch on the patio of the studio's cantina—which was used as a set for Hopalong Cassidy movies in the 1930s!