“How do we set up the control system to accommodate everything we need for a huge show including capacity for different festival rigs?” Matt Arthur, Lighting Director for System of a Down’s current European tour, and festival appearances asked Jack Moorhouse, Jands product manager from A.C. Entertainment Technologies.
Rob Sinclair’s ambitious creative design for the Headline European tour by the American alternative, Grammy-winning rock band contained over 800 individually controlled elements, including a touring floor package, festival house rig and a large hybrid video wall. The wall incorporated embedded RGB pixel lights alongside a traditional video screen. The lighting pixels themselves required 2,128 DMX channels.
Arthur originally planned to run the video and pixels from two separate media servers, with overall control from Jands Vista. The solution was to network two Jands Vista L5 consoles together, alongside a Vista D1 distributed processor. Moorhouse commented: “Doing this provided more than enough DMX universes for the entire show and festival pickups, whilst simultaneously providing tracking backup and networked processing redundancy. Additionally, running all hybrid pixels directly from Vista’s inbuilt FX engine meant that a second media server was no longer necessary.”
The resulting control system allowed Sinclair and Arthur to easily create and manage a fully integrated visual display for the show using a combination of video, lighting and pixel mapped effects.