RIT enters the world of Pixera
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Recently, RIT completed a highly anticipated building project on its campus called the Shed, short for Student Hall for Exploration and Development. This new creative hub will centralise the university’s makerspace and performing arts studios and theatres.
An important visual detail of the inspiring structure is the new 3072 x 3584px Planar LED marquee, a key component of the Shed’s celebration space, which was donated by RIT’s alumnus Austin McChord.
The successful entrepreneur is an avid supporter of his alma mater and favours the experiential learning approach that defines many of RIT’s acclaimed courses.
After looking at different options for a media server system to support the LED-marquee’s content playout setup, RIT chose AV Stumpfl’s Pixera four server, perfect for highly demanding real-time graphics applications and XR/broadcast setups.
The award-winning 64-bit system for real-time media processing, compositing and management has become increasingly popular in the world of virtual productions, a fact that didn’t escape the notice of David Long, director of RIT’s MAGIC Centre.
MAGIC, short for Media, Arts, Games, Interaction & Creativity, is a university-wide research and development laboratory and a commercial production studio that assists in efforts to bring digital media creations up to marketplace standards and commercialisation.
Long comments: “On a purely practical level, we have the technical requirements related to our new marquee. Pixera fitted the bill perfectly, both in terms of the feature versatility and general ROI. Since we have many courses, however, where our students would benefit from getting hands-on experience with a high-end media server platform like Pixera, our interest goes beyond having a great playout system.
“We want our students to create, collaborate and perform together at the highest possible level. Pixera can act as a powerful bridge between our design, film production and engineering courses. Our plan is to gradually introduce Pixera to our curriculum, so that our students from different disciplines are empowered to turn their creative and technological ideas into a tangible reality.”
