Chauvet LED panels for Dune London premiere
- Details
Impact Production Services (IPS), which provided technical services for the event, deployed a powerful the Chauvet Professional F4IP LED panel for setting up the outdoor video walls.
The IPS team used 236 of the 4.8 mm pixel pitch panels to create a 28m wide by 4m high video wall that ran almost the entire length of the red carpet. Displaying a series of dramatic images from the movie that were supplied by the film company and played back via a Disguise Media Server, the wall added a powerful and engaging cinematic flavour to the event, in addition to providing an attractive backdrop for videos and photos featuring the hit film’s stars.
“One of the main reasons for the premiere was to attract media coverage, and with such a large display being installed, it was essential that all the technical production elements not only looked great, but were also reliable,” says Tom Warden of IPS. “The first consideration, given that the installation was outdoors, was to choose an all-weather, IP-rated panel. IPS have already used the Chauvet F4IP and X6IP LED screen systems extensively in outdoor applications, so we knew that they would perform well, even if the weather was against us.
“The next consideration was the resolution and refresh rate, as it was essential that the high-resolution images could be displayed and look great on camera,” continued Warden. “The 4.8mm pixel pitch of the F4IP panels meant that the high-resolution requirements of the production could be met - along with the client specification for a small pixel pitch.”
Using an ultra-widescreen format (nearly a 64:9 ratio), the IPS team achieved an overall pixel resolution of 5,824 x 832. Clever mapping enabled the content to be displayed from a single 4K video feed.
The Dune premiere was the result of hard work, relentless attention to detail, and extensive contingency planning on the part of all involved. This began with Limited Edition Event Design’s James Barnfather and Richard Godin; the latter of whom designed the lighting for the event and ran it using a ChamSys MagicQ MQ 80 supplied by IPS.
James Mason, project manager for IPS, Dan Ainsley, technical lead, and media server programmer Nathan Dunbar also contributed greatly to the effort. The IPS team connected the F4IP panels with True1 cables for power and EtherCon cables for data. Power was supplied via onsite generators, and multiple feeds were used to protect against any single point of failure. As a further safeguard, each panel was connected with two data feeds, with panels grouped into multiple zones to provide data redundancy.
