To provide a punchy yet versatile background to proceedings, the set design for the World Cup broadcasts replaced a conventional printed, brightly lit backdrop with a 20m wide rear-projection screen lit using four Christie L2K1500 15,000 lumenprojectors soft-edge blended together to create a 180 degree digital canvasthat wrapped around the rostra that housed the presenters and pundit team.
"The Christie projectors provided a lot of punch and incredibly vibrant colours, really bringing the background to life and ensuring that Stuart Gain, the lighting designer, didn't have to compromise his lighting in order to make the background visible," comments Andy Hook of Shock Solutions."Combined with the 300m of scenic LEDs Shock supplied, the result was afresh, exciting, warm look, inviting even as eager rugby fans awoke to watch in the early hours!"
Driving this backdrop was one of the new ArKaos A30 media servers, fitted for this occasion with SDI inputs to allow down-the-line feeds from reporters or pundits in New Zealand to be shown on the screen. The A30 comfortably handled the many layers of video soft-edge blended to the four projectors, with its built-in geometric correction allowing the screen's curved geometry to be easily dealt with.
A second, 10m screen formed a separate interactive set in the same studio, lit using Sanyo projectors soft-edged together; stacks of HD LCD monitors were then constructed around the presenters table and in the foreground of the set. The second screen and monitor stacks were controlled using three further ArKaos media servers; these were also fitted with SDI inputs so that live feeds from reporters or highlight and analysis packages created in the studio's edit suite could be shown on any or all of the displays.
Control for all of the media servers came from one of the first LSC Clarity LX300 lighting consoles, in parallel with its public debut at the 2011 PLASA Show. The Clarity console drove the media servers via Art-Net while also using the CITP protocol, allowing media to be seen on the console as it was placed in the servers using the library manager in the ArKaos MediaMaster software.
"The integration with the media servers and the way in which Clarityallows you to interrogate the media and manipulate the layers was our mainreason for wanting to use Clarity on this project," Andy Hook explains. "With the LX300 console adding hands-on control to Clarity's proven stability and performance."
(Jim Evans)
