It was Storrington Camera Club's turn to do the Regnum Print in November 2010 and I took on doing the sound and image projection. This is an account of what I did. You may not have access to the equipment I had so adapt this to the resources which you do have. It is always worth asking round to see if you can beg steal or borrow equipment from other local organisations.

Projecting images of the prints

This was the first time we asked clubs to provide the digital images of the prints which were entered into the competition. Doing this was a great step forward, however not all of the images exactly matched the prints so it looks like some authors aren't terribly well organised with their digital originals. Having said that, the end result was far better than trying to photograph all of the prints.

This was the requirement for the image files which we sent out to the member clubs:

Please submit a CD or memory stick with a copy of each of the 6 print submissions. These images will be used for projection alongside the print in the competition. The images should be in jpeg format, should not exceed 1400x1050 pixels, and should be in the sRGB colour space. The file meta-data should specify the title of the image and the author; in Photoshop (or Photoshop Elements) go to File/File Info... and make sure that Title and Author are filled in with the title and author of the image. The image files should be named as follows:

<round><club code>-title-author.jpg

E.g.,

3D-Pretty View Of Something-Fred Bloggs.jpg

The naming of the files was important. When all of the files were put into a single folder and imported into our projection software the images are sorted into alphabetical order. By making the round the first letter of the name the images were sorted into rounds. If the club code was first it would be a time consuming task to sort the images into rounds. Once imported the images for each round were randomised (I had a showing order supplied by the print secretary).

Not all of the clubs managed to follow these instructions. One club got the names wrong (they put club code first) and the same club's images either had no meta data or rubbish in the meta data. A couple of other clubs had minor errors in the meta data. Given that the majority of clubs got it right it was straightforward to get the images in the correct order with author names and titles available.

We use Film Free Projection for our competitions. I would recommend that you try it out, it isn't the slickest piece of software I have ever used but it does offer the functionality which clubs need.

Displaying results

I used Excel 2010 to prepare the results. You can download my spreadsheet file at the bottom of this page and use it as a starting point for your competition. I would be grateful if you were to do that because I run this website and having the results sent to me in an organised fashion in a spreadsheet makes my life a lot easier. The thing we learned was that the author names should have been in the 'order list' sheet so please add those otherwise the person announcing the score can't announce the author. Luckily our announcer was sitting next to me and could read the authors off the computer screen.

The spreadsheet file has sheets for the results for each round, in order to prepare them for projection I generated a PDF of each sheet. If you have Excel 2007 or 2010 PDF output is built into it so use 'Save As' from the file tab and choose PDF for the output format. You will have to do that for each sheet in turn. If you have an earlier version of Excel either install Open Office (which has PDF export) or CutePDF. Next open the PDF file in Photoshop, that pops up a dialog box asking for the size of the image, enter a value which is 100 pixels less then the horizontal resolution of your screen (in our case 1340). Next use Image/Canvas Size in Photoshop to expand the image to fill your projector resolution (in our case 1440x1050). Last of all 'Layer/Flatten Image' (make sure the background colour is white). Save the resulting image and add it to the images to be projected. I have attached an example PDF and image file to this article. I saved the images in the tif format as our software understands that format and it doesn't introduce compression artefacts.

You will also need a composite image of the winning club and copies of the images which score 20 to put on the end of the show.

I managed to borrow a 20m VGA cable so that I could sit at the back of the hall where I could see and hear what was going on and was out of the way of the audience. If you use HDMI you can get 20m HDMI cables, they aren't cheap so see if you can borrow one.

Sound

I an fortunate in having a front of house set up of my own and a friend who is willing to lend me four expensive microphones. Good microphones make all the difference when doing sound. The PA equipment I have isn't expensive and the speakers are poor but a good sound can still be produced. I also have a long cable which allows me to get out of the way at the back where I can hear properly.

Try to get a tie mic. and give that to the judge. Make sure that the microphone is as near to his throat as possible and pointing up. Check that just before the start, every judge takes it off after you have placed it and puts it back on pointing sideways. Always use fresh batteries, I have been to Regnum Crouch events where the mic. battery has failed part way through, don't let that happen. If you have a mixing desk with decent equalisation (low, swept middle and high) turn the low down a bit to stop the voice booming, turn the middle down a bit (3db-6db) then ask the judge to talk (take a print of yours and ask him to judge it) then turn the frequency control until his voice is clear. You are trying to get rid of nasal sounds and resonances. If the judge has a cold turn the mid down more and you should be able to tune it out. Set the high to zero, if the voice sounds muffled then turn the high up a little, but be careful as you may cause some nasty high frequency feedback if you go too high. You will also need a hand held microphone for announcements, the same equalisation principles apply here. The better the microphones you use the better the results you will get.

Other stuff

I ran a continuously cycling Powepoint presentation beforehand which included a reminder to turn off mobile 'phones. I also put all of the images into Lightroom and used that to project a slide show of all of the entries during the interval.

I hope this helps, if you have any questions martintomes [dot] org [dot] uk (get in touch.)