The size and scope of the Super Bowl Halftime Show might seem daunting for some media servers. But last year d3 performed flawlessly at the annual Eurovision Song Contest, a unique competition seen by 180 million TV viewers in 45 countries. So d3 took the Super Bowl's 118.5 million viewers in stride.
"Super Bowl XLIX was one of the first big American shows run on our award-winning 4x4pro hardware, a very powerful platform," says Ash Nehru, Technology Director at d3 Technologies. "It marked our acceptance by the American market. With Eurovision and the Super Bowl behind us it shows the industry how serious we are about handling projects of this size and complexity."
Jason Rudolph has deployed d3 media servers on various projects over the years, but thanks to the introduction of SockPuppet DMX in r.11.2 he has increased his d3 usage. SockPuppet enables those who want to tap all d3's mapping, playback and projection features to do so while using their preferred control surface, including most lighting consoles. In Rudolph's case that meant the grandMA2 light, his desk of choice.
"The d3 media servers were great - and there were a lot of challenges on the Super Bowl," says Rudolph. "Ash was on site with us and created some custom tools that helped us pull off a show that would have been significantly harder without d3."
d3 played a key role in the prepro process, too. Cincinnati-based Lightborne used a d3 4x4pro media server from Upstaging, Inc. in Los Angeles to previs the LED animation and projection effects it created for Perry's performance.
Ben Nicholson, video content director for Lightborne, began using d3 in the prepro process. "I know it's called a media server, but I see d3 as the world's greatest simulator," he says. "Integrated into our workflow it gives us real-time pixel-accurate information about what our content will look like. When you can't get to the venue until the last minute, it's important to visualize everything before you get on site."
Over a three-week period Lightborne mimicked the stadium inside the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena using eight projectors to map the basketball arena's floor to scale.
"We were able to take the CAD image of the stadium and the camera plots and plug them into our 3D file and calculate all the angles," Nicholson says. "We had the virtual hero camera parked in the d3 system a month ahead of time. When we arrived at the stadium for three days of rehearsals we saw how close to the actual camera we really got: We didn't have to rerender everything to match the real camera, which was a huge time saver."
He notes that being able to accurately plot the camera view, including set pieces from the production CAD, turned d3 into "a prepro tool for director Hamish Hamilton and the choreographers, too. They were able to see how the audience would view the show from all angles, and it clarified the whole concept of projection mapping for people who might not have known what it is."
Nicholson emphasizes that using d3 for previs "really streamlines things. It helps us make intelligent choices about how to create and preview media."
Back at the stadium Rudolph was taking adv
