The set design for this year's show was dominated by an immense 29m x 14m semi-transparent Martin LC Series LED wall located upstage. Built from more than 200 LC 2140 panels, the LED wall covered 406sq.m and had a physical resolution of 725 x 350 pixels. A further 32sq.m of LC panels were used on a 7m high moving catwalk. A single LC panel 'door' allowed presenters a unique way to enter the catwalk and set through the LED wall.
Visual content for the LED walls and projections was created in full HD by set and video designer Florian Wieder and fed from FOH via five Catalyst media servers. In addition to stock media server content, live pictures were presented on the LED wall with switch over of the image source occurring via media control out of the OB van.
Production company voss | mediaDesign was responsible for the lighting design and playback of the video content. Manfred Voss of voss | mediaDesign worked closely with Florian Wieder who specified the Martin LC Series for the show.
Manfred Voss comments, "The LC Series offers the best video result for the best price. Besides the video performance, when working in such large dimensions the price performance relationship is very important.
"The LC Series offers a very good light output, so that we had to reduce the brightness for the show to 50%. Every pixel on the HD control monitor of the media server corresponds to one pixel on the LC wall. That guarantees a good image quality and exact scaling." The LC wall was reportedly rigged and functional in less than six hours.
The lighting rig on the show consisted of over 350 moving lights including 132 MAC 2000 Washes, 68 MAC 2000 Profiles and 28 MAC 700 Profiles, along with other automateds, conventionals and Pixelline LED Striplights.
Lighting supply was from PROCON Event Engineering of Germany. Martin provided on site technical support headed by product & application specialist Claus Jensen.
(Jim Evans)