Northern Light delivers colour to Genting Arena
- Details
In 2015, Genting UK, part of leading global leisure and entertainment company, the Genting Group, took over the former LG Arena at Birmingham’s NEC. Now known as Genting Arena, the 15,700-capacity venue is the Midlands’ premier entertainment destination, hosting events from world-class comedians, sportspeople, singers, songwriters, dancers and daredevils.
“Northern Light has enjoyed a good relationship with the NEC group for several years, having completed successful installations at several of their sites, which is how we became involved in this project,” Says Michael Percy, project manager/ design engineer for Northern Light
“The existing work light in Genting Arena was poor and deteriorating and they had issues that affected visiting touring companies, so they wanted to upgrade both this and the house light the system, the aim being to create a safer environment for the staff to work in, to give their customers a better experience and for both systems to be energy efficient, consequently reducing running costs for the venue.”
With no suitable off-the-shelf solution available, GDS custom built 2m LED tubes to deliver the required brightness and coverage.
“When we came to look at the house light system, the venue’s chief electrician, Pete Hammond, had seen a coloured LED installation at the Ziggo Dome in Amsterdam and wanted to adopt a similar system for Genting Arena,” explains Michael. “We knew that ETC’s fixtures would be the right lighting products to work with. It just so happened that Ziggo Dome was also an ETC installation, so this gave us a great platform to work from.”
The final system comprises a combination of ETC and GDS fixtures, with 372 no ETC ColorSource PARs General Wash for houselights and 163 ETC ColorSource Spot fixtures for aisle lighting. Work lights are a total of 240 GDS Custom LED tubes (“These ticked all the boxes and gave us exactly what we needed,” says Michael.) and GDS Arc8 Cell units.
A GDS Mains Blues System is installed along the catwalks and Follow Spot control areas. All fixtures are mounted at high level using custom metalwork and bracketry. Control is via an ETC Gio Console and three ETC Paradigm Systems with an ETC Paradigm Central Server. These are located at two different locations around the arena (north and south) with the system also tied into an existing ETC network to form a much wider control network.
The system is powered by two ETC Sensor 3 racks with relay modules located at two different locations around the arena (again, north and south) to minimise the lengths of the cable runs, with the DMX/S-aCN Network distributed by an ETC Net3 System with 17 ETC Four-Port Gateways.
(Jim Evans)
