Beautiful Pictures at High Noon

Gary Westcott, a leading LD in his own right, worked closely with Bennett’s vision to establish a novel way to integrate video with the overall show look, whilst remaining flexible enough to fine-tune. This required very specific equipment: at the heart of the system is the Pinnacle PDS 9000 video switcher, essentially a three M/E switcher with nine in-built DVEs, six of which are actively used in the show to create most looks and effects. With the arrangement of the screens on the stage, three different mixes are available at any given time with the Pinnacle. The PDS 9000’s ability to store numerous still images is also utilized. Four channels of a Tektronix Profile video server, two dual-channel Fast Forward hard drives, and a single channel Fast Forward are all combined each night with 3 Sony D35 operated cameras and four programmable Panasonic pan-and-tilt cameras. This is all amalgamated into the PDS 9000 switcher, and sent back out through a Leitch 32X32 routing system, with a little help from the GVG distribution. Using a Dataton show control system to pick which-and-when images roll, the last output ‘stop’ is through the Electrosonic Vector processor – which has the final command as to where the images will appear. The result is a collage of old pictures, live images, and story-telling panoramas. mailto:Higgins@XLVideo.tv