TV and Projector Hire for a Sydney CBD Conference: 180 Delegates and Too Much Daylight

A half day conference in a Sydney CBD hotel: 180 delegates, a 9am start, and a room with floor to ceiling glass on two sides. The client had booked a projector. We changed it. Here is the reasoning, the kit list, and the two things that nearly went wrong anyway. The room is one you have almost certainly sat in.

The brief in one paragraph

180 delegates, theatre style, half a day finishing at 1pm. A keynote with slides, two video plays, a panel of four and a live question and answer. One loading dock booking at half six in the morning, a goods lift, and a hotel that wanted everything out by 3pm. The running sheet said "projector and screen" because that is what it said last year, and last year the conference was in a windowless basement room.

This year it was on a mid level with glass on the north and east sides. At 9am in July the sun comes into the east side of a Sydney tower at exactly the angle that ruins a projected image, and the blinds were the fabric kind that make a room dim rather than dark. That single fact drove the entire kit list.

Why the projector was the wrong answer

A projector throws light at a passive surface, and everything else in the room competes with it. In a properly blacked out ballroom a conference package with a projector, pull up screen and stage piece is excellent value, and it goes out weekly. In a glass room with dimming blinds the same package produces a grey, washed out picture with no contrast, and every dark slide in the deck turns into a smudge. The back three rows read nothing.

You can fight it with brightness. A Panasonic PT-EW650 at 5800 lumens or an Epson 5000 lumen Full HD projector punches through a great deal more ambient light than a small unit, and for plenty of daylight rooms that is the correct fix. But a 180 seat theatre layout is deep. To get a pull up screen big enough for the back row you need a throw distance that puts the projector somewhere around row eight, and an image big enough for the back row is also dim enough to disappear at the front. The room fought us both ways.

What went instead: 4K TVs, and why two

The answer was our 2 x 75 inch TVs on Big City stands package. A 4K TV makes its own light, so daylight is simply irrelevant to it. Blacks are actually black, the brand colours in the deck came out the way the designer built them, and nobody had to touch a blind all morning.

Two screens rather than one, for a reason worth remembering. A 180 seat theatre room is wide as well as deep. One screen in the centre means the people on the ends read a slide at an angle from twenty metres away. Two screens, one either side of the stage on Big City TV stands, cuts the worst viewing distance almost in half and gives the panel somewhere to sit that is not in front of the content. The stands take a base plate and a VESA mount and they stand on their own, which mattered here because the hotel would not allow rigging of any kind.

The test we use: go and stand where the last row will sit and try to read the smallest text on the client's actual slides, not a test pattern. If you cannot read it, the screen is too small or the room is too bright, and no amount of turning the projector up will fix either. Most people test with a logo, which is exactly the thing that always looks fine.

A bigger room would have gone further. Above roughly 250 people, or where the client wants the screen to be the set as well as the content, an LED video wall with control and rigging is the answer, because you build it to whatever size and shape the stage needs. It costs more, it needs serious power and a level surface, so it is never automatic. At 180 delegates on a hotel carpet with one dock booking, two 75 inch TVs were the right call.

The bit everyone forgets: getting the picture into the screen

Vision hire is not really about the screen. It is about the four sources somebody will want to switch between while 180 people watch. Here that was the keynote laptop, the client's video files, a holding slide for the panel, and at one point somebody's phone. Left alone, that becomes a person unplugging an HDMI cable on stage.

A Roland V-1HD vision mixer went in front of the screens. Everything plugs into it once, at the start of the day, and stays plugged in. Switching source is a button, and it cuts cleanly rather than showing the room a desktop wallpaper and a low battery warning. One of our show laptops held the video files and the running deck, so nothing depended on a presenter's personal machine and its update schedule, and a Bluetooth wireless presenter clicker meant the keynote speaker was not stood next to a laptop for forty minutes.

Sound came off the same van: a QSC K10.2 and KSub conference setup, a gooseneck lectern microphone and an Audio Technica wireless lapel microphone for the panel chair. One delivery, one dock booking, one crew. That is the actual reason to hire your vision and your audio from the same warehouse, and it is worth more than any single item on the list.

The dock, the lift and the half six bump-in

CBD vision jobs are logistics jobs. The screens are the easy part. What has to be known before the truck leaves Waverley: the dock booking time and reference, the dock height, the goods lift dimensions, whether the building requires an induction, and how far the walk is from the lift to the room. Two 75 inch TVs travel in flight cases, and a flight case that does not fit a goods lift is a very expensive object to stand next to at half six in the morning.

It went in clean, which is the boring outcome you are actually paying for. The one thing that nearly caught us: the hotel had the dock booked for half six, but the room was still set from the night before and the chairs did not arrive until quarter past seven. The TVs and stands got built at the back of the room and rolled into position afterwards, which is only possible because the Big City stands sit on a base plate rather than being rigged. Flying a screen from truss would have cost forty minutes nobody had.

What actually went in the van

• 2 x 75 inch 4K TVs on Big City stands, freestanding, either side of the stage. No rigging, no blinds, no blackout needed.
• A Roland V-1HD vision mixer, so four sources became one clean feed and switching was a button rather than a cable.
• A show laptop and a wireless presenter clicker, so the day did not depend on a personal machine.
• A QSC K10.2 and KSub conference setup with a lectern microphone and a wireless lapel for the panel chair.
• Spare HDMI, long HDMI and an adaptor bag. Every conference produces at least one person whose laptop has only USB-C, and it is always five minutes before they present.

What we would change next time

A third screen. The panel sat in a line of four and the two on the ends could not see either TV without turning their whole body, so they answered questions about slides they could not see. A single Hisense 75 inch 4K TV on the floor at the front, facing back at the stage as a confidence monitor, would have fixed it for very little. We suggest it on every panel job now.

The deck should have arrived earlier too. It landed at twenty to nine. Two of the slides were built at 4:3 and stretched on a 16:9 screen, which could have been flagged on the Thursday and nobody would have noticed on the day. Send your AV company the actual slides, not a description of them.

If you are planning something similar

Daylight, a deep room and a dock booking describe most CBD conferences we do. Our TV and projector hire page for the Sydney CBD has the delivery detail, the dock and marine notes and the packages that go out most often, and the full range sits under projectors and vision. The same pages cover the rest of our run, including TV and projector hire in Bondi Junction and TV and projector hire in Double Bay, and if the audio is the harder half, speaker and PA hire in the Sydney CBD covers it.

If you are not sure whether your room wants a projector, a TV or a wall, send us a photo of it taken at the time of day your event actually runs. That one photo answers the question faster than any spec sheet.