Aktuelle News & Schlagzeilen

Avolites Ai R8 servers integrate Notch and BlackTrax for Creative Generation

Queensland’s Creative Generation (CGen) event is known throughout Australia for giving rising young stars the chance to perform on an arena stage with world-class production and visuals. Now in its fourteenth year, CGen 2018 was bigger than ever.

More than 1,800 schoolkids participated in the government-sponsored event, which took place over two days at the 4,000-seater Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre’s Great Hall. A series of performances to an invited audience was backed by a 38 m x 6 m rear projection screen and a 18 m x 20 m stage, which served as a large projection surface.

Gold Coast-based AV production expert Ikonix was contracted to supply projectors, media servers, content, programming and operation. Co-founders of the company, Zachary Burton and Richard Saunders, specified two Avolites Ai R8 servers for the upstage 6848 px x 1080 px screen. To drive projection onto the stage, displaying 2209 px x 2469 px, they specified two custom machines with Ai Miami Licence dongles as main and backup.

“Having Ai for this project, we were able to utilise AutoBlend and AutoMap - the camera-based automatic blend and warp feature in Ai,” says Burton. Burton and Saunders created more than 900 GB of content for the 50+ different acts that took part.

On top of this, they incorporated Notch real-time generated content with the BlackTrax vision-based system to track dancers and generate content on the fly. BlackTrax was supplied and integrated by Kyle Means from Visional Productions.

“A lot of the show was pre-programmed in our studio, which was a mixture of timecode and free-run content pieces,” Burton explains. “But we also introduced a lot of on-the-fly and reactive content using BlackTrax and Notch.

“We had moments where one item had a combination of timecode playing floor and rear screen content, as well as moving into layers of manual cues and feeding timecode into Notch, so the generative content could be timed to music while tracking dancers.

“We used our lighting console to control all the servers, building a single cue stack to play the show back. Updates on-site are common and things like timings were fine-tuned right there in the auditorium. Things like colours, contrast and brightness were all adjusted on-the-fly during the rehearsals, too.”

Both Avolites Ai R8 servers were outputting in 4K. The signals were then split using Datapath FX4s, allowing the team to output to the multiple projectors around the room. In addition, they took two SDI inputs to each server, sending camera feeds and other content to create some new PIP designs.

(Photos: Queensland Dept of Education and Training)

www.avolites.com

© 1999 - 2024 Entertainment Technology Press Limited News Stories