What drew them was the appearance of a new video control system which can be accessed live, in real-time, from a lighting desk. So what’s new? "What we’ve done is approach this as a light, not video," explained Mark Hunt who is responsible for all the M Box software. "That’s a crucial difference: to me video is just a secondary thing. Videos, especially movie clips, want to be scaled, rotated, colorized - and yes, you can do all those things, but M Box is not designed just to present video. For a start there’s a huge library of stock images on board - over 2,000. With M Box you’ve also got total video control, and an in-built editing suite, all run from your lighting desk."
Listening to Hunt were such lighting luminaries as Willie Williams of U2 and REM fame. With some five productions of We Will Rock You, the Queen stage musical now running in various cities around the globe, William’s interest is intriguing: "Video is now a line item on a certain scale of tour, so this makes sense. What I want is something that can produce and control multiple images," and he didn’t mean the same image on multiple screens.
Answering Williams’ request directly, software tester Jonathan Holt explained exactly what M-Box could already do. "In a single M Box there are multiple layers of control. Typically for a single, complex, image you might run two video streams overlaid, with two effects on top, but you could run four totally separate images if you wished." Linking M-Boxes together is virtually unlimited, so Williams’ desires are essentially addressed. The system itself is already well tried and tested - M Box runs off Apple Xerve Internet servers. The software within M Box is a direct derivative of the Icon M development. In its current form it only works from Icon consoles, but the DMX version is already underway. M Box can currently be seen with The Eagles in the US.
Steve Moles
