Video director Paul 'Eggy' Eggerton worked closely with engineer Wolfgang 'Wolfie' Schram to produce an original IMAG look for the band, which was rear projected onto two 20 x 11ft side screens, each fed by a single Barco HD20 FLM machine.
The set design was acollaboration between lighting designer Nick Gray and the band's creative director Aitor Throp. It included a striking 20m wide by 10m high structural arch which was raked forward, and rigged with 134 x 1.5m lengths of Barco MiStrip LED.
Eggerton enjoyed his third tour with the band. He used five Sony DXCD 50 cameras with TX7 backs - two at FOH with long lenses, two in the pit and one hand-held onstage - all busy between them keeping up with the massive energy coming offstage from the band. "It's a very direct, rock 'n' roll, fast and furious, in-the-face mix," he says, which he cut using one of XL's GV Kayak vision mixer.
The Kayak was fully loaded with inputs including all five DPM channels which were used for numerous effects.
Eggerton used a Magic DaVE to produce a special filmic effect across the whole output, adding a classic slightly dirty, gritty texture.
The two Catalyst media servers were looked after by Philip Haynes, and they supplied content produced by Silent Studios to a large 12mm LED dome upstage. Additional visual effects - like extruding and luminosity - were added to this playback footage in four songs via a custom piece of software written by Andreas Müller, which contained a lot of timecode triggers. This was run on another two Macs also tech'd by Haynes in addition to the two Catalyst machines.
Timecode was generated by drum tech Laurie Jenkins' Pro Tools system which sent timecode and click to Haynes for synching the playback footage. Haynes also distributed timecode to the lighting console at FOH. The video inputs driving the MiStrips were supplied from a separate lighting Catalyst media server run from their desk at FOH.
Haynes oversaw all the timecode management using two MIF4 interfaces supplied by XL Video and also in the XL racks were GV Turbo hard disks for logo storage (for support acts, changeovers, etc.) and any playback material that was needed to be controlled and output to screen directly from the Kayak.
(Jim Evans)
