grandMA2 provides control for SAP conference
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The conference has grown to encompass three days of keynotes, workshops and an exhibition floor. America’s SAP Users’ Group (ASUG) helps customers connect with each other, understand SAP products and services better and learn how to get the most from their investment.
“The conference has become exceedingly large attracting some 20,000 participants,” says Sonnleitner, “and spans the entire convention centre. We need solid network technology to handle it, and it’s nice that we can stay within the MA family to do so. We don’t need an IT department to provide solutions.”
The entire event featured 82 universes of DMX for 2,970 focusable conventional fixtures and 927 automated fixtures. A six-foot tall 3,800 x 480 pixel videowall, fed from two MA VPU plus MK2 (Video Processing Unit), served as a cyc displaying SAP’s signature colours and graphics upstage of five projection screens dedicated to IMAG and graphics. Over 1,500 points suspended five and one half miles of truss that supported the rig.
“The show was massive,” Sonnleitner says. “We had two grandMA2 full-size in the Keynote Theatre, another in the Live Business Theatre and a fourth as a roving focus console if we needed it on the floor. One grandMA2 light was positioned in the catwalk to patch fixtures as necessary. All the consoles were networked together.” Six MA NPU (Network Processing Unit) were also deployed.
A fibre backbone distributed data and kept several VLANs with MA-Net2, sACN, and media server CITP separated. Two MA Network Switch “easily divided these protocols for the VLANs and saved us a lot of time,” says Sonnleitner. “We could have spent more money on other brand switches, but the MA Network Switch solved all our problems, and I could configure them from the console.”
(Jim Evans)
