Jess Glynne began her 11-date UK and Ireland tour at Glasgow’s SSE Hydro Arena in mid-November 2018. Supplying full Video Production services and LED screens across the UK was Transition Video.
The six-person crew worked with a PPU built around Blackmagic Design hardware, to bring to life Show Designer Cassius Creative’s visions of vibrant floral backdrops incorporating Glynne’s bird of paradise sigil, and an underwater aquarium theme.
Opting for something a little different, the backdrop was made up of a curved ROE Carbon Series CB5 5mm LED. “Creating the concaved section in-between the two side IMAGs was a little bit of a challenge,” admitted Transition’s Director Rhodri Shaw. “But by using curving corner clamps, we added a 5° angle every 1200mm, and were really pleased with the outcome.”
Four Ikegami HDK-79EX III studio cameras, paired with Canon B4 optics, were deployed for live acquisition, with two situated on tripods in the pit, one on a tripod in FOH and one handheld. In addition, four Panasonic PTZ robocams were discretely dotted around the stage.
“For talkback, we had the RTS two-wire system patched into the Ikegami four-wire camera system,” added Rhodri. “Tallys and touchdowns were taken care of via a Skaarhoj ETH-GPI Link and the Blackmagic GPI & Tally interface.”
Transition’s Project Manager, Carl Stage explained further: “We used our ATEM 2 M/E Production Studio 4K to take each of the eight live cameras feeds via an AJA matrix. Pre-recorded content and custom graphics, created by FRAY Studio, also inputted as a source to the ATEM via SSDs onto a HyperDeck Studio Pro.”
All of this content was then vision mixed on a Blackmagic Design ATEM 1 M/E Advanced Panel before the HD TX feed was fed into Transition’s Hippotiser V4 Karst media servers and mapped to the IMAG positions stage left and right. A Smart Videohub 12G 40×40 dealt with TX returns for the cameras.
“The ATEM switcher and 1 M/E control panel are the core components of our touring kit,” Stage said. “Together they do absolutely everything we need them to, and at a very attractive price point.”