So, recently I’ve begun to appreciate digitally-projected pixels a lot more.  Here at The Master’s College, where I work, the journey of such a pixel might look something like this:

From the map of an idea in my boss’ brain a choice of color and direction and placement is made using a computer graphics program called Photoshop as the navigation system.  At the beginning the pixel stands ready to depart from a small notebook computer LCD screen (that according to windows is set to “true color”).  From there it is piled into a compact rental car filled with 0’s and 1’s as a digital file that has embedded color profiles and is probably crowded a bit because of compression.  Then it is ferried over via thumb drive to a different laptop landing and into a waiting projection program called Pro Presenter.  Pro Presenter helicopters those 0’s and 1’s with nifty transitions and maybe some overlays onto the graphics output of our Mac Book.  From there a hard series of downtown traffic stops must be made through the mini-DVI bridge around the S-Video signal, into the downtown traffic of the video switcher only to be shot out via high-speed rail down a long (200′) composite cable.  The long train ride ends at grand-central-6000-lumen-projector station.  From there the color engine tram formats thing so that they display on the internal LCD, through which the final airliner of light from the two projection bulbs sends the pixel on to its final destination through a tailor made short-throw lens on our 16′-wide rear-projection screen.

So that’s quite the journey.  Many formats, many transferrs, different light sources, varying resolutions.

So, it’s not as easy as you think to get those pixels up there.