vga 100 ft

[bcastle]

so i relocated our projector and messed up both vga cables that are running to the projector. I pulled on the end to hard and i think the cable came loose on the inside. I'm going to buy a new one tomorrow if i cant fix it.

the picture seems to be a little bit better than before. however i noticed that when the computer is hooked up to it, the picture is not as bright as when i am just using the projector setup menu screens.

should i buy an extender and put in our booth next to the computer to send out a stronger signal? The cables we have are about 125' and are heavy duty thickness wise.

[shane2943]

Originally Posted by bcastle

should i buy an extender and put in our booth next to the computer to send out a stronger signal?

Yes.

VGA cables should be no longer than 50-75ft (if they're high quality, shorter if low quality) when no VGA amp is used.

[bcastle]

i went ahead and bought an amplifier/splitter combo today. Signals a little better but not by much. the projector is a 2000 lumen office projector that is suppose to have a max of 10% ambient light. i have ( 600 watt par 56 cans. my projector was 28' from the screen mounted to the same light truss. I moved the projector up 8' to put it where is was suppose to be based on the manual. I might move the lights but not right now.

[daver2]

What about putting the VGA amplifier approximately half way down the run?

This would split each individual cable run up into (say) a 50' plus a 75' which are both within spec.

The run from the PC to the amplifier will require termination within the amplifier and the run from the amplifier to the projector will require the terminations in the projector (which they should be now).

This is the approach we have taken for our long VGA runs and things work fine.

Dave

[shane2943]

Not necessary. All of the VGA amps that I've seen advertise the ability to boost the signal for runs up to 200-250ft. Our church's projectors have VGA runs to them that are around ~150 or so. The VGA amp is in the booth right next to the media PC. Never had an issue.

Putting the amp mid-run is not a problem as long as the pre-amp run is not too long. The rub, though, is if the amp gives you trouble down the line, servicing it would probably be more difficult depending on how your church is laid out. At out church, mid-run means in the ceiling 30ft above the pews.

[bcastle]

in theory i could put the amplifier mid run but i dont have an outlet between my projector and computer, only near the projector.

I have a cat walk that runs length wise, then i have trusses that run width wise about every 14 ft. There arent too many spots i cant get too, unless its in the boxed area between trusses.

For today's service we had the amplifier right after the splitter behind the cpu. It went ok. I had a weird faint top to bottom line scroll going on. Went back to church after lunch and to see if i could fix that. Unplugged the amp to see if that was the culprit and the video went dim on me with both 2 monitors (my second on my desk and the projector are clones of each other). Unplugged my projector and my desk monitor's brightness increased. Plugged the projector in, dim again. Verdict: we definitely need the amp. Tightened all the plugs back up and the scrolling seemed to be lighter. not sure what that is about. This never happened before.

[shane2943]

Interesting on the scrolling line. What is the refresh rate set at on your video card in the PC? Might try changing that to see if you can get that line to go away. The default for most monitors and projectors is 60Hz. Try 70 or 75 and see if that improves things.

[bcastle]

That was one of the first things i tried. Im using my 23" acer that I have sitting around. I used it with a 19 4:3 dell monitor running cad and accidentally had different refresh rates for each monitor. AutoCAD said "I don't thing so" and would bog down something fierce. I usually have my monitors at 60hz. Changed em both tho 75hz and it only made the lines scroll faster. I'm going back up to the church tomorrow. I have bigger fish to fry. Like my cpu using between 45%-55% of my 4 gb ram to IDLE!!!!!

Just did a reformat on the computer along with adding 2GB of ram and adding a 1gb radeon graphics card to play video in easy worship. this is the thanks i get. I already ended all of the safe processes in xp. dont think i had this problem before but then again i only noticed the slowness after upgrades when i try and play videos in easy worship.

[shane2943]

Hmm...double check that the video cable is not running over or next to any power cables or conduit. That could produce a squigly line on the out put. If it's only doing that on the projector, then something with the signal to the projector is at fault.

Does the squigly line also pass through the projectors on-screen menues, or just through the signal from the PC?

CPU at 45-55%?! Something is eating that up for sure. Check your processes in the task manager and see what's eating that up! Might be a runaway process of some kind.

And man, I hear ya on computers not thanking you. I built my church's media PC. It's a Core i7 8GB DDR3 monster of a computer.....that took longer than a pentium 2 with Vista on it to boot. Took me a couple of months and 3 hard drives to find out that I just had very very bad luck with hard drives! I eventually stuck an old dinosaur IDE drive in it and it started working fine (albeit slower than it should have been)! A week ago, I upgraded that IDE drive to an SSD and FINALLY, the PC shows the performance that I built it to have. UGH!

[daleeper]

Originally Posted by bcastle

For today's service we had the amplifier right after the splitter behind the cpu. It went ok. I had a weird faint top to bottom line scroll going on. Went back to church after lunch and to see if i could fix that. Unplugged the amp to see if that was the culprit and the video went dim on me with both 2 monitors (my second on my desk and the projector are clones of each other). Unplugged my projector and my desk monitor's brightness increased. Plugged the projector in, dim again. Verdict: we definitely need the amp. Tightened all the plugs back up and the scrolling seemed to be lighter. not sure what that is about. This never happened before.

Sounds like it could possibly be a grounding issue, we have that problem, and temporarily lifted ground at the computer and projector to prove it, then put it back in place. We also ran an extension to the projector from same outlet as computer to prove grounding problem, then took it out, you don't want to run that equipment without grounds. Our projector and computer come off two seperate disconnect boxes. We have not found a good solution, right now we are living with the lines. Our distribution amp was supposed to take care of it, but does not seem to. Hopefully you can find the problem and an easy fix.