This annual show, now in its fourth year, has grown from its birth in a small Utrecht club through Amsterdam's Heineken Music Hall to the Ahoy. Presented by Dutch broadcaster Radio 538, it featured a main and a 'B' stage, a live radio broadcast and a TV highlights show. Top Dutch dance, rock and pop acts starred with headliners Simply Red.
The main stage PA, tucked in unobtrusively either side of the 'light wall', was Ampco Pro Rent's Synco W8L Martin Audio line array, while a Renkus-Heinz Synco Touring System PA served the 'B' stage at the opposite end of the arena. Protone supplied the backline.
With a need to maximize audience capacity, the main stage had to measure just 10m deep. A 'virtual set' achieved this, using an immense upstage wall of Studio Colors, mounted as a 28 x 12 matrix on scaffold, erected by Stageco, with the 8 x 4m VersaTILE screen tracking horizontally and vertically in front of it. All lighting and video graphics were under the control of a Wholehog III - on its first major show in Holland - and a Wholehog II, using Flashlight Rentals' own software and hardware to merge video signals with DMX. With the Hog II controlling colours and dimmers, the Hog III looked after movements and beam shapes, allowing the combined visuals to be handled by a team of four - lighting designer Henk Jan van Beek, a graphic designer and two Wholehog operators.
The visual concept for the 'light wall' - using moving heads as a video pixel matrix - was inspired by LD Henk Jan van Beek and lighting operator/software programmer Hans de Vet. It was then taken forward into practical reality by Flashlight Rental and Sightline Productions.
It was aided by the inter-company synergy that's been engendered by the Ampco/Flashlight Group's management buyout in 2003, with lighting rental company Flashlight and Ten Feet - which was responsible for the appearance of a WISYWIG suite at Holland's Pink Pop festival last spring - collaborating on the idea.
The idea was to develop software that would enable RGB video graphics to be transferred onto a matrix of moving heads, effectively combining the two types of light source into one design and operation. Although the principle of using moving heads matrix-fashion has been seen before, this vision of synchronizing their movements as a massed video graphics display took on a new form.
In Control
Computer-created 3D images were bitmapped and then rasterized to fit the 28 x 12 deep pixel format, at which point each of the 336 moving head 'pixels' was intelligently merged into the lighting DMX data stream via ELC Ethernet converters, under the command of the twin Wholehog desks.
Van Beek explains that although the concept is workable with any type of DMX-controlled CMY fixture, the Studio Colors were deemed particularly suitable because of their fast shutter response: "We're using a parameter on the fixture that's normally not used to switch over to an intensity effect: when they hit a certain value of the parameter, it goes into a quick shutter instead of the slow intensity change, and that gives you the responsiveness to create fast-moving images."
Hans de Vet's home WYSIWYG suite was the programming venue for three days and when, after a 10-hour rigging session at the Ahoy, the system was fired up, he says: "It ran like a dream - perfect from the word go."Van Beek continues: "It's another step on from putting Photoshop images into a regular video wall - these heads add pan
