The beginning of 2019 saw the opening event of the UCI WorldTour, the Santos Tour Down Under. Held in South Australia, it is the southern hemisphere’s biggest cycling event attracting 750,000 visitors and is globally recognised. In pitching for the contract, Adelaide’s Novatech Creative Event Technology proposed some fairly innovative audio-visual ideas and deploying Brompton Technology’s Tessera SX40 LED processors helped them deliver.
“We wanted to improve the spectator experience on every level,” said Ashley Gabriel, Director of Sales and Marketing at Novatech. “We deployed our ROE CB3 and CB5 LED screens at the start and finish lines, with signal transported over fibre via Riedel’s MediorNet.”
At the Tour Down Under Village in Adelaide’s Victoria Square, Nexstage built a custom 18 metre wide by 8-metre high Layher scaffold structure for team presentations and daily events, vinyl wrapped with signage and paired with a 30 square metre ROE Visual CB5 LED screen.
“We used our Brompton SX40 4K and S4 processors. They are quite amazing and we had a lot of comments as to the quality of the screens and the race images,” continued Ashley. “We used our CB5 with airframe and CB3 panels on the event and all performed superbly on the Brompton processors.”
The Tour Down Under is not just a bike race, it is also the southern hemisphere’s biggest festival of cycling and after 1980s corporate pastiche pop stars Client Liaison had rocked the opening night, the live site stayed active for the 10 days of The Tour running interviews, highlights, competitions and fan entertainment.
“The Brompton processors worked perfectly throughout, and in searing 40 degrees-plus of heat that is typical of an Australian Summer,” Ashley concluded. “The picture quality was stunning and the broadcaster even made mention of the quality of the image on the CB3 panels which were used at the podium stage for presentations. These screens were directly in the broadcast shot, which proves the Brompton / ROE combination is about as good as you can get.”