Hippotizer V4 for MGG & the EOH Awards
- Details
At the Johannesburg leg, Gallagher Estate in Midrand ran two shows with 4000 guests attending per night, while 2 000 guests attended the performance hosted at the Cape Town International Convention Centre and a further 700 people attended the wonderful festivities at the Durban ICC.
Johan Botha from MGG has been in the industry for many years, and has experience with media servers, though it was his first time on the Hippotizer V4 Boreal. “An MA command wing controlled the Hippotizer V4. We ran main and back-up which went into a matrix switcher in the unlikely case that anything should go wrong. Honestly though, the Hippo is a reliable piece of kit.”
Having worked with the Hippotizer V3 in the past, Johan has seen a huge improvement. “I felt very comfortable running the Hippotizer V4, the videos didn’t stagger and there were no worries that the server would fall over. I ran big files - the Hap Codec in Quick-Time format – and the system behaved brilliantly. It was a phenomenal experience.”
With a background in lighting, Johan believes that media servers are at their optimum performance when run in conjunction with a lighting console. “It gives the user a lot of versatility and the one thing that I really love about the Hippotizer V4 is the versatility. It allows you to do many things on the fly during a show. At the EOH event in Durban and Cape Town, the main show was followed by a DJ performing in the same venue. I could continue running the visuals, obviously able to compliment the beat and music being played, in comparison to time line programs which do not offer this flexibility.”
Content for the EOH event was supplied by MGG, in fact created by Johan himself. Running the show and creating the content was a great undertaking, and he made use of two computers, one to edit and the other to export as he loaded the content to the Hippotizer V4. “It was an intense show but the client was ecstatic,” he said.
Petro Palmer from Festival Sound ran the audio aspects for the show on the DiGiCo platform. He sent time code from Reper to both Johan and lighting designer Francois van der Merwe, who were both using MA.
(Jim Evans)
