The company responsible for the installation was Benchmark Productions, a full service live event production company based in Lake Forest, Southern California, who worked in conjunction with Picturall US's Dylan Ankney in order to deliver the Lakers' ambitious AV project.
The Picturall Octo is housed in the video booth. Four outputs from the Octo are sent to four 1-in/2-out HDMI distribution amplifiers from Lightware. From there, the signal is sent to eight Lightware DVI-to-fibre converters ready to transit onto the existing optical fibre network running out from the video booth to various locations throughout the venue.
"Benchmark installed eight double-stacked Christie projectors throughout the venue (two in each of the four corners)," described Ankney. "Each stack covers 90 degrees of the 360 degree image that is projected onto the kabuki."
A kabuki is a fabric screen - in this case cylindrical - on which images can be projected and drops on cue for a sudden reveal to add a little bit of drama to the proceedings. For the Lakers install, the kabuki drops from the scoreboard at the center of the court. "All of the media content is synced to time-code which is on one track of the audio that is playing back from the server through the addition of a Presonus 22VSL USB audio interface," continued Ankney. "This time code is also sent via the house distro to the lighting console so that all transitions are in sync with the video playback."
The entire image shifts 90 degrees with every game, so that people who are sitting in the same seat or seat block as they were last time (e.g. season ticket holder, press, staff, VIPs etc.) get to see the video from a different viewing angle every time. "The clip features some cool movement around the cylinder so we wanted to make sure everyone had the opportunity to see it from all angles," explained Ankney.
Josh Bachman, the owner of Benchmark productions comments, "We were impressed by the Octo's ability to play back such huge media files with no need to distribute the load over additional machines, as we had found with other multi display software products. We also needed rock-solid dependability, so the fact that Picturall runs on a Linux platform eliminated concerns about using consumer-grade operating systems on the playback machines. Octo is definitely a professional-grade media server."
(Jim Evans)
