The MTV European Music Awards took place at The SSE Hydro in Glasgow on Sunday 9 November 2014 and saw artists like Ed Sheeran, Ariana Grande, U2 and Alicia Keys amongst many others perform, with the awards being hosted by Nicki Minaj.
The enormous setup for the show involved a range of companies such as XL Video, who provided all the LED screens, fixtures and projection for the show; multiple graphics agencies, and Chris Saunders from Ogle Hog, who was in charge of coordinating and managing all the media playback and control systems. Ogle Hog invited FIX8Group on board to programme and operate their Hippotizer fleet, which included media formatting, outputting and programming.
For the event production director John Montague and media server technician Charlie Wright used 10 Hippotizer HDs, four as Genlocked units, five HDs, plus one Hippotizer HD at FOH to look after the content encoding and management. Everything was controlled by a full-size GrandMA2 desk.
The 10 media servers were programmed by Montague to control the main circular screen with an output resolution of 2560x2028 pixel as a single canvas, the 1920x1080 B Stage screen and side wings, VFLEX strips that were video-mapped around the entire setup at 1920x1080 and more than 8000 Barco FLX24 Pixelstrings which were fitted into the main stage vortex design. Additionally they managed the output of various live camera feeds into the screens on the night.
FIX8Group went with Green Hippo's new proprietary FlexRes codec for encoding, management and playback to enable all media content to have great colour space and smooth playback across all the display surfaces. A perfect fit for the event that was the 20th MTV EMAs since its inception in 1994, the show created an unforgettable spectacle and blew away the over 10,000 audience in the venue and many more globally who tuned in to watch.
With plenty of work keeping FIX8Group busy since then, last week saw the Victoria Secret Fashion Show 2015 showcasing the companies lingerie range for next year.
On Tuesday 2 December London's Earls Court was transformed into one long video catwalk and stage with performances by Hozier and Taylor Swift amongst others, whilst the VS models were showing off gemstone studded lingerie for all in attendance to a high resolution LED backdrop and floor.
FIX8Group's John Montague and Nick Charalampidis used six Hippotizer HDs at the ready to run the 3k main LED screen as well as the flown LED sections and the LED video catwalk. Front-of-house they used one Hippotizer HD taking care of encoding and content management, programmed from a GrandMA2 Light desk. The high resolution canvases were mapped to content from single server outputs to keep consistency of frame playback.
The finale of the trio was the inaugural BBC Music Awards, held at Earls Court. Ogle Hog asked FIX8Group once more to provide and programme the media servers onsite, so Montague and Charalampidis brought five Hippotizer HD servers to the mix to control the 3D-mapped LED cube centrepiece of the stage, content to the IMAG screens and the various onstage special screens and live GFX and Camera captures for the artists requirements.
(Jim Evans)
