The City Of Helsinki considers Season Of Light to be one of their major annual events with this year seeing over 50.000 spectators walk along the light path from the Senate Square to the Parliament House during its 10 day showcase. The project was covered by CNN International news as well as every major TV channel and newspaper.
W-DMX was used for Martin Kuhn's design on Unioninkatu (Union Street) entitled 100 Years. The installation used 126 pieces of Laser Imagineering Sunbeam 100cm full colour LED fixtures. Each piece used 60 parameters for a total of 7560 parameters. The W-DMX system handled a total of 18 Universes at distances up to 450m.
Site technical manager Eero Helle of Noise House Finland said of W-DMX, "The whole system was up and running from the evening of 29 December. It performed under very harsh weather conditions with snow and temperatures down to -25°C (-13°F). In the same room where we housed the transmitters, Finnish Broadcast Company, YLE, put their digital link to broadcast the live show from Senate Square on New Year's Eve and there were no interference problems whatsoever. YLE also used two wireless cameras on that show approximately 200m away from our transmitters, and there were no interference problems with those either."
Technical production manager Jussi Kallioinen added, "Had we used actual DMX cable, the installation would have required somewhere around 4.5 kilometers plus splitters and repeaters.By using W-DMX we only used 250m of cable and that was only to find a better place for the receivers. It saved us not only loads of cable but loads of time and energy."
Lighting Designer Martin Kuhn noted, "The W-DMX was reliable, that's true. This was not your ordinary venue either but I have used it before and it was always rock solid, so I had no worries. I was concerned beforehand about the heavy traffic on 18 lines of 480 channels of DMX controlling LED and potential lag time, but that was totally fine. It was all good."
(Jim Evans)
