Wireless technologies for outdoor movie systems

Getting rid of wires has been a technological trend since the late 1990s — think of cellphones and Starlink satellite internet. The absence of wires makes your gadgets more portable and much more convenient to handle.

Over the years, many AV professionals have grown comfortable with wireless devices. There are downsides to consider, though: wireless gear is often less reliable, less stable, and costlier than the wired alternative.

Video signal transmission to your outdoor movie projector

It's a tempting idea to ditch your HDMI cable and send a video signal wirelessly from the content source to the outdoor projector. The market offers solutions that claim to do exactly that — but having tested dozens of wireless HDMI products, neither our customers nor we have found one that's truly reliable.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of problems we ran into:

• Signal delays.
• Audio and video falling out of sync.
• Limited resolution, bitrate, and frame rate.
• Signal interruptions from physical obstacles, interference, or bad weather.

If your company offers a wireless HDMI solution that doesn't have these issues, we'd love to test it — send it our way.

Alternatives. If you need wireless content delivery to your projector, use a streaming device such as Apple TV, Chromecast, Amazon Fire Stick, or a compact media player. That way you assign the content to the device itself instead of transmitting a raw video signal to the projector.

Wireless outdoor movie speakers

Long XLR cables are heavy and bulky, but — as with wireless video — it's extremely difficult to transmit an audio signal without delay or quality loss in real-world conditions. There are quality wireless speakers with built-in Bluetooth that are great for music, but for movie dialog you want the characters' speech synchronized with the picture, and that's where Bluetooth lag creeps in, thanks to range, interference, and the sheer amount of data involved.

Alternatives. Good old XLR cables from the audio mixer to the speakers — period. But if you truly must go wireless, the one tried-and-tested option is a transmitter-and-receiver kit from Sennheiser (one per channel, left and right) of the kind made for live dialog recording.

In everyday life, wireless technology makes things easier. But when it comes to the smooth run of a professional outdoor movie event for your customers, a bunch of good old cables will buy you peace of mind.