Av issue 2 by Alchemedia Publishing

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ALSO: REVIEWS, BIG SCREENS, ACOUSTICS & TRANSVESTITES

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LESS IS THE RIGHT AMOUNT: MIX MINUS EXPLAINED

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ON THE BRIDGE: BEHIND THE SCENES OF THE AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL & SEA PATROL

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OLYMPIC CEREMONIES & WORLD YOUTH DAY UNDER THE MICROSCOPE

THE COMMS ISSUE

Fol

Power plug: CEE 3P 16 A; 400 1x Internet / Net 1x Telefone

6.16

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AV Installation Concert Production Lighting & Entertainment Technology Recording Multimedia Broadcast Staging Post Production MI & DJ Technologies

The One Event 6th– 8th July 2009 Hordern Pavilion & Royal Hall of Industries, Moore Park, Sydney

www.integrate-expo.com • louise@integrate-expo.com • +61 (0)402 206942

REVIEW

Editorial Cut Costs, Spend up Big Oops! It seems that while our back was turned, someone carelessly knocked over the free-market economic system and broke it. Perhaps our cries of victory over Communism were a bit premature after all. As boardroom salaries plummet to merely outrageous levels, we are facing the prospect of an entirely new world order in the business and financial structures of our clients and customers. I suspect that for appearance’s sake, boards may stop building themselves lavish boardrooms and dining rooms for the next couple of years — just until the shareholders stop asking uncomfortable questions at the new not-so-lavish AGMs. Although we may see a reduction in expenditure on some of the more ostentatious trappings of corporate ‘success’, such as booths and sponsorships at sporting events, flamboyant tradeshow stands, Nuremberg Rally-style shareholder meetings and executive pampering, there are still areas that may grow and prosper. Developments in teleconferencing/video conferencing/telepresence/virtual presence have reached the point of being usable and tolerable over the public telecommunications networks.

Couple this with the corporate need to do something impressive to assure shareholders and the media that they’re making savings by cutting travel costs while simultaneously saving the planet, and we have the right planetary alignment to see a whole new round of installations. Soon we will be tendering for a spate of superbly-furnished, lavishly-appointed highdefinition teleconferencing facilities in executive suites, complete with accompanying catering and entertaining suites. They may also feature quite sophisticated surround sound facilities to allow them to also be used for sumptuously-catered screenings of the sporting events that they are not able to attend. Get out your orderbooks and prepare for a new round of corporate construction as the big end of town spends its way into cost cutting and reducing its carbon footprint. Thanks for all the good wishes we received on the launch of AV. It’s great to know that so many people in the industry found our first issue both interesting and informative. Keep your suggestions and comments flowing.

for th

e audi

ovisu

al prof

essio

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Contact AV’s Editor, Andy Ciddor on: andy@av.net.au

Not just a magazine www.av.net.au AV Industry Jobs Board: the best place to hire & be hired

Crew Dan is a veteran IT Infrastructure professional working for enterprise-class businesses, and also DJs and VJs. His career has revolved around multimedia production, IT operations, programming and network infrastructure. He prefers the idyllic surroundings of the forest, and enjoys AV, art and music production pursuits when not ‘working for the man’. He is the type of guy that can really appreciate ‘quality production & mastering’.

Advertising Office: (02) 9986 1188 PO Box 6216, Frenchs Forest, NSW 2086

Editorial Office: (03) 5331 4949 PO Box 295, Ballarat, VIC 3353

Editor: Andy Ciddor (andy@av.net.au)

Since 1982 Gep has at various times been a musician, writer, composer, location sound recordist, student, resource manager, audio director, actor, film maker, improvisor, producer, traveller, and teller of bad jokes. His latest adventure is musical director/improvisor for This is Your Laugh, a 16-episode light entertainment series for Ch7 HD.

Advertisement Manager: Stewart Woodhill (stewart@av.net.au) Editorial Director: Christopher Holder (chris@av.net.au) Publisher: Philip Spencer (philip@av.net.au) Art Direction & Design: Dominic Carey (dominic@alchemedia.com.au) Additional Design: Heath McCurdy (heath@alchemedia.com.au) News Editor: Brad Watts (brad@av.net.au) Editorial Assistant: Mark Davie (mark@av.net.au) Circulation Manager: Jenny Temm (jenny@av.net.au)

Paul Collison is a freelance lighting designer based in Sydney. He has a purple suitcase that is more a home than his house and has an addiction to a decent espresso and a good Eggs Benedict on crispy bacon, not ham. Armed with these vices he takes on the world of lighting design and operation on special events, both domestically as well as overseas. Normally adept at writing six or seven lines in an email, Paul will attempt to write an article on his experiences pulling together the control system for the recent Beijing Olympic Games Opening & Closing Ceremonies.

alchemedia publishing pty ltd (ABN: 34 074 431 628) PO Box 6216, Frenchs Forest, NSW 2086 info@alchemedia.com.au All material in this magazine is copyright © 2008 Alchemedia Publishing Pty Ltd. The title AV is a registered Trademark. Apart from any fair dealing permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. The publishers believe all information supplied in this magazine to be correct at the time of publication. They are not in a position to make a guarantee to this effect and accept no liability in the event of any information proving inaccurate. After investigation and to the best of our knowledge and belief, prices, addresses and phone numbers were up to date at the time of publication. It is not possible for the publishers to ensure that advertisements appearing in this publication comply with the Trade Practices Act, 1974. The responsibility is on the person, company or advertising agency submitting or directing the advertisement for publication. The publishers cannot be held responsible for any errors or omissions, although every endeavour has been made to ensure complete accuracy. 15/10/08

Graeme Hague worked for the last 20 years in regional theatre venues as an audio, lighting and AV technician. Graeme is a regular contributor to AudioTechnology magazine and was the principal writer for the new Guerrilla Guide to Recording and Production (www.guerrillaguide.com.au). He owns a Maglite, a Leatherman and a wardrobe of only black clothing which proves he is overwhelmingly qualified to write on any technical subject.

Familiar Extron control panel layout for ease of operation

Front panel serial port for convenient setup and configuration

Menu-driven picture adjustment simplifies setup; reduces time-to-operation

Four customizable card slots accept a variety of optional output boards:

Wideband 8x8 matrix switching

IP Link® Ethernet and RS-232 serial control ports

Fully configurable inputs accept RGBHV, HDTV, component video, S-video, or composite video signals

• Universal RGB & Video Scalers - DVI Output - HD-SDI Output - Analog RGB Output • Video Scaler • Scan Converter • Single Output Wideband • Dual Output Wideband

Audio output volume control eliminates the need for audio preamps in many system designs

Switches balanced and unbalanced stereo audio

The Extron ISM 824 Modular Integration Scaling MultiSwitcher

Integration Flexibility in a Single, Compact Enclosure The ISM 824 MultiSwitcher is a unique modular matrix switcher that allows for simultaneous video/RGB scaling and wideband switching in a single, compact enclosure. It combines the powerful signal routing capabilities of an eight input, eight output, wideband matrix switcher with versatility of four customizable outputs. The Extron ISM 824 can be equipped with any of the available scaling or scan conversion output boards for initial project requirements, and then upgraded at any time in the future with additional boards as system needs evolve and expand. It is ideal for applications such as boardrooms, auditoria, and classrooms that require highperformance signal routing with flexible, on-board signal processing. Up to 4 of the 8 outputs can be individually scaled or scan converted to suit the requirements of virtually any presentation system. 1365 x 768 Plasma Display

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Issue 2 22

REGULARS NEWS Includes a Light Lock preview.

TERMINATION The highs and lows of digital signage.

FEATURES

ENTER THE DRAGON An AV project that’ll float your boat.

OLYMPIC LIGHTING CONTROL Paul Collison offers this first-hand account from Beijing.

IF THE CHEMISTRY IS RIGHT Melbourne Uni chemistry students move into the 21st century.

REAR PROJECTION ALL AT SEA Thanks to rear projection, Sea Patrol doesn’t miss the boat.

ASSAULT ON THE SENSES The Australian War Memorial brings our miltary history to life.

OLYMPIC COMMS Yes, everyone had a radio receiver.

WAVE IF YOU CAN HEAR ME An enormous city-wide challenge? Is the Pope German?

THIS TECHNOLOGY SUCKS Dracula’s theatre restaurant avails itself of some cutting-edge AV.

AMWAY CALLING The Amway China juggernaut rolled into town. What a screen.

TERTIARY AUDIO VISUAL AV tracks the stunning changes.

INTERACTIVE PROJECTION Why just look when you can 'touch'?

TUTORIALS

80 76

MIX MINUS AV gives you a clean feed.

ACOUSTIC ABSORPTION Knowing the basics goes a long way.

PROJECTION SCREEN FUNDAMENTALS Get the best from your screen.

REVIEWS BOOK REVIEW Control Systems for Live Entertainment.

SANYO PLC-XL50 Ultra short-throw projector.

AVIOM PRO64 Digital multicore system.

INTER-M PX8000 Analogue 8x8 matrix.

012

NEWS

REVIEW

1/ AMX EXPANDS MODERO VIEWPOINT LINE

2/TANNOY VQ LOUDSPEAKER RANGE

3/YAMAHA INSTALLATION

Designed as a lower cost alternative to the MVP5200i 5.2-inch Modero ViewPoint widescreen touch panel, the MVP-5100 and MVP-5150 look ideal for individuals who want the sleek design of the MVP5200i, but do not need all of its features. Both touch panels are built on the MVP-5200i platform providing fast, power-efficient processing – up to three hours of continuous use and two and a half days of standby use – and excellent resolution (800x480 WVGA). The design is extremely compact and light (weighs less than half a kilo) and it fits into the MVP-5200i table and wall charging system. Specifics: the MVP-5100 offers one-way IR communication and is ideal for single room control such as a home theatre, home office or hotel room. Its built-in IR-only communication can be important in applications where 802.11b/g may not be permitted. The MVP-5150 extends control to an entire home or office via its wi-fi (802.11b/g) capabilities. The MVP-5150 works seamlessly with AMX’s Resource Management Suite. AMX Australia: (07) 5531 3103 or www.amxaust.coma.u

Tannoy has launched the VQ Series, a range of loudspeakers designed for applications where precise directional control and high SPLs are critical, such as large corporate AV systems, stadiums, large dance clubs, live concert halls, theatres and open-air venues. Why the ‘Q’ in VQ? Well, we’re sure you’ll think us awfully clever when we explain that the ‘Q’ factor is a ‘mathematical expression’ that indicates directionality of the sound source. A larger Q value denotes more directional sources. As the VQ products will range from well defined, very wide, to narrow dispersion patterns, Tannoy feels the Q is a valid descriptor, as the company is not only catering toward the ‘Hi–Q’ market. Utilising Tannoy’s design nous, the VQ series can produce enough power and clarity to be used individually, maintaining the aesthetics of buildings, unlike line array solutions. VQ incorporates a driver technology to radiate a coherent single point source (400Hz-23kHz) for pattern control when coupled to a Point Source Waveguide (PSW). The design aligns the acoustical centres of the transducers. Syntec International: 1800 648 628

Yamaha’s Commercial Audio division has developed a new range specifically for small- to medium-scale installations. In the spirit of a spade being a spade, the range has been dubbed the Installation Series. Particular attention has been placed on the speakers’ phase response, which have been kept smooth and consistent across all models — mix and match speakers to suit any system and venue without ending up with hot and dead spots due to phase interference. Models include three-way, two-way, large, small, highpower, medium-power and other variations, all with a large variety of dispersion characteristics. There’s a range of standard U bracket and array frame hardware available, and switchable single-amp and bi-amp drive modes (with bi-amp and tri-amp modes for three-way models). Yamaha Commercial Audio: (03) 9693 5272 or www.yamahamusic.com.au/products/commaudio

NEWS / BRIEF

Queenwood School for Girls in Sydney is installing voice recognition technology onto 500 desktop computers. The aim is to let teachers provide pupils with word-for-word class notes. Teachers will also use the technology to produce school reports from their spoken notes. John Bennett, the General Manager of the Office of the Board of Studies, says some Australian schools may allow pupils to use computers in exams over the next five years, although he kept mum about

exactly which technologies pupils might use. Meanwhile, in Japan, the Tokyo Joshi Gakuen all-girls school already allows students to use the Nintendo DS for English vocabulary, penmanship and audio comprehension lessons. Some students at the US Fort Summer High School, New Mexico, even watch educational videos and listen to lectures on Zune players donated by Microsoft. (Source: Sydney Morning Herald via the Register Hardware website.)

Here’s a heart-warming example of audiovisual technologies working for good and not evil: A direct internet link has been established between a tiny church in the ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ town of Beeac, to share a morning worship service. The Glen Waverley Uniting Church transmits its 11am service onto a large screen in Beeac, in an experiment that has sparked the interest and hopes of many country churches. (Source: The Age.)

C4 has announced an agreement with the Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre (BCEC) to implement the Cisco Digital Media Solution (DMS). Using the IP network as the platform to enable end-to-end video solutions, each of the 60-odd monitors will be integrated with the interior design of the Centre across the foyer providing informational and dynamic signage on large, slim LCD displays. Cisco: www.cisco.com.au BCEC: www.bcec.com.au

Gearhouse Staging Connections, the Dubai-based business partnership between Staging Connections and locally-based shareholders, has won the Venue Event Services Partnership contract for the US$1.5b Atlantis, Palm Jumeirah. Gearhouse Staging Connections will assemble an onsite team of 15 technical and client services personnel from its Dubai and Australian operations. Staging Connections: www.stagingconnections.com

EzyRoom_Schematic.pdf 14/10/2008 10:09:05 AM

Admin PC

Calypso IC62S 6.5” 2-way 8ohm speaker x 2

Calypso PSM-UNV

Above grid suspended ceiling kit with 6-9” pole

Calypso PSM-UNV Secure equipment box with projector mount C

Calypso CP-650

Dual VGA, Composite Video & Audio Inputs 2- gang Wallplate

CMY

Calypso CA-1000

Projector

32W,4-input ampliﬁer with IR/Serial Control Cat-5 Cable Cat-5 Cable

LAN Calypso TB-450 (x2)

Calypso ION-LT2

Cat-5 break-out box with VGA, Composite Video and Audio

DVD VCR COMBO

Networked Controller with 2 Serial ,2IR, 2Relays

Calypso CB-1000

Laptop w/Audio

8-Button wall panel with IR/Serial control

Document Camera

Classroom PC

4/ CALYPSO FOR THE CLASSROOM Calypso introduce ezRoom, an affordable, flexible and complete classroom AV solution available from a single manufacturer. One part-number and one price delivers integrated device control, hardware and software user interfaces, remote monitoring and control, audio amplification, CAT5 wall plates, projector mounting and all the wires, cables and connectors needed to build out classrooms and other presentation rooms. ezRoom includes a Calypso ION-LT2 networked device controller, a CA-1000 32-watt 4-input amplifier with IR and serial control, a CB-1000 wall-mount button panel with built-in scheduling, the CP-650 CAT-5 AV wall plate with dual VGA and AV inputs, encore! user interface software, and Maestro admin monitoring software. Adding to efficiency, components are prewired in an equipment box that doubles as a universal projector mount. Additional ezRoom options include the Calypso WCM-RF wireless classroom microphone and the CSD-500 Analog CATV tuner with full IR and Serial control. According to Calypso, ezRoom simplifies many aspects of AV classroom design and build-out, without compromising performance or flexibility. IDT Technology Distributors: (02) 9417 4924 or sales@idt.com.au

Sydney-based A/V provider Videoplus has acquired Showcorp and its divisions, Showcorp Video Solutions, Showcorp Production Services and The Great Outdoor Lighting Company, to form the Videoplus Group. CEO Bob Dewstow says the group can now tackle larger high-end events with services including show direction, stage management, advanced lighting and sound design, plus sophisticated projection technology. Videoplus: www.videoplus.com.au

The iFace is the latest addition to the popular ProCo Sound Trade Tools range. Designed to interface consumer-grade audio players to professional sound systems, these units allow simple connection of the -10dBV signal from devices such as MP3 players, Apple iPods, laptop computers and consumer-type CD/DVD players to the balanced microphone inputs of professional mixing consoles. Madison Technologies: 1800 66 99 99 or av@madisontech.com

Palazzo Versace, described as Australia’s only six-star hotel, has announced the appointment of Videoplus as its new in-house audio visual technical services provider. Videoplus has confirmed that preparations are well advanced to replace the venue’s superseded audiovisual systems in time for its three-year initial tenure. Videoplus: (02) 9690 3400 or www.videoplus.com.au

014

NEWS

REVIEW

4 6

1/ EXTRON ZONES IN

2/SYMETRIX AUTOMIX MATRIX 780

3/ BRIGHTSIGN SOLID STATE MEDIA PLAYERS

Extron has a new range of HDCP-compliant HDMI and DVI matrix boards for the SMX System MultiMatrix — Extron’s modular, field-configurable matrix switching platform. These new matrix boards, available in I/O sizes from 4x4 to 8x8, bring the total number of SMX matrix boards to 35, covering all common analogue and digital AV signal types. Use the SMX System MultiMatrix where multiple signal types, such as hidef and standard definition video, computer-video from game consoles or media centre PCs, and stereo audio, must be routed to different rooms or zones. Also new, is the RGB-HDMI 300, an RGB-to-HDMI scaler that converts incoming analogue component video and RGBHV signals to HDMI. It accepts HDTV and hi-res computer video, and offers multiple, selectable HDMI output rates up to 1920x1200. RGB Integration: (08) 8351 2188 or extron@rgbintegration.com.au

The Symetrix Automix Matrix 780 provides 12 channels of auto mixing with eight sub-mixes and comprehensive DSP, controlled by one of the ‘easiest to use, user interfaces in the industry’. The Automix Matrix 780 was designed for courtrooms, government chambers, corporate boardrooms and houses of worship. The automixer features filters, EQ, compression and feedback elimination into gating or gain-sharing automixing, with full control over NOM (number of open microphone) counts and priorities. Four line inputs include filters and EQ with automatic gain control (AGC) for devices such as CD and DVD players, TV audio or an additional mixer. Sub-group or mix-minus mixes may be dedicated to specific tasks such as recording, archiving or broadcast, and may be routed to up to eight unique locations, each with EQ and limiting. Production Audio: (03) 9264 8000 or info@productionaudio.com.au

Roku has released two new BrightSign models, the HD600 and HD2000. BrightSign products are nonPC (this refers to the lack of a Windows OS, not to the penchant for making mother-in-law jokes), solidstate media players with no moving parts and low power consumption that support standard and highdefinition video, photos, music and interactivity. They deliver excellent video quality with simplicity and reliability to high-impact displays, making them the ideal solution for in-store point-of-purchase displays, museum exhibits, digital signs and interactive kiosks. To cop a demonstration contact Clinton Walker on (02) 9417 4924 or clintonw@idt.com.au Price HD600: $860; HD2000: $1204. IDT: www.idt.com.au

4/ EON — NEXT GENERATION

1/ AMX 5-INCH VoIP TOUCH PANEL

6/ EXTEND EVERYTHING!

It's not every day you see a new JBL EON Series… let alone two. Featuring three models, the EON500 Series delivers ”more power, portability, and versatility than any other speaker in its class”. The EON515 offers 450W of power at a bantamweight 14.8kg, while the EON510 delivers 280W in a 7.7kg package. The EON518S sub features an 18-inch JBL Differential Drive low frequency driver with a chunky 500W of power. Following closely will be the EON300 Series. Consisting of the active EON315 at 280W, and the passive EON305 at 250W — more than adequate for small gigs or as an add-on to the 500 Series. Installers will be pleased to learn that the new EON now has standard M10 mounting points — screw M10 eye bolts through for easy installation. Jands: (02) 9582 0909 or info@jands.com.au

AMX is expanding its range of widescreen intercomenabled touch panels with the new five-inch Modero wall/flushmount touch panel with Intercom (NXD500i). Measuring only two inches deep and connected with just one cable for audio, video, voice, data and power, it’s a simple panel to install. The touch panel displays motion jpeg over IP, integrating a digital, full-duplex intercom for panelto-panel communication via any other i-Series Modero Touch Panel and the AMX Metreau Entry Communicator. The NXD-500I is ultra thin and can be installed inside two inch walls with new mounting system utilises locking tabs which allow quick and easy installation. The touch panel will be shipping in December 08/January 09. AMX Australia: (07) 5531 3103 or www.amxaust.com.au

Gefen’s 4x4 line audio over Cat5 matrix enables connection between four component video sources and four displays while supporting digital and analogue audio I/O. Individual receivers located at any of the remote displays connect to the source via one Cat5 cable. Up to 300m may be traversed with ‘faultless’ replication of audio and video resolutions to 1080p. Two new distribution amplifiers enable AV systems using the component format to split and deliver two or four identical signals. Optional extension of both audio and video up to 300 meters at 1080p full HD over CAT-5 cable — indispensable for new or retrofit installations. The 1:2 and 1:4 line audio over Cat5 distribution amplifiers both operate with the same methodology. Amber Technology: (02) 9452 8600 or gefen@ambertech.com.au

Australia and New Zealand’s Complete Sound, Vision and Lighting Distributor brings you

FUSION Magazine Incorporating

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Gold Coast City Council solve intelligibility problems with Iconyx.

Ship to Shore – Crestron’s automated solutions take to the seas!

Product News from Audio Telex, Australian Monitor, Crestron Control Solutions and Lighthouse Distribution

>Installation News >Product News >Technical Updates >Consultant’s Corner

There ain’t anything old about this heritage listed building! Fairfield council uses exterior lighting to bring life to School of Arts.

Versatile, environmentally friendly and cost effective, the NEW designLED

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Your free copy of Fusion Magazine is enclosed in this issue of AV. If you have not received your free copy of Fusion Magazine, email your postal details to marketing@hillssvl.com.au and we will gladly send you a copy. www.hillssvl.com.au phone: (02) 9647 1411.

016

NEWS

REVIEW

Bose’s Skilled Conversion A new footy team needs a stadium, and a new stadium needs a good sound system. As it turns out, Rugby League’s freshlyminted Gold Coast Titans has a brand spanking $160m home, called Skilled Park and — in another first — it’s the first major installation in Australia of Bose Freespace DS16 speakers. Along with a bunch of other models from the Bose range, the DS Series loudspeakers were used along many of the public concourse areas and the indoor public spaces within the Park. The 27,000-seat stadium houses 100 open corporate boxes and 28 closed corporate suites, a 500-seat function centre and 16 food and drink outlets — all of which needed to be adequately wired for sound. The installation of the Bose sound system involved the backof-house sound system and the sound system installation for the bowl or the main arena of the park. FreeSpace DS16S and DS16SE surfacemount loudspeakers and the DS16F flushmount versions enhance the spectators experience by reproducing sound with notable presence and detail. The speakers are well-suited to background music but importantly in this installation at Skilled Park, speech reproduction of public address announcements with high intelligibility was a requirement. The horizontal or vertical mounting options offer increased installation flexibility and the pitch or yaw adjustment directs the sound to where it’s needed. Three versions of this robust 16W, passive

loudspeaker was used to provide coverage indoors (DS16S and DS16F) and outdoors (DS16SE). As part of the new DS Series range, each delivers pages and announcements in a large environment such as a park with clarity and intelligibility. Sydney installation company The PA People installed the sound system in the Gold Coast stadium with the help of its team of specialist electricians, audio engineers, audio visual installers and riggers. This was not new ground for the installation company, having previously installed sound systems into the likes of Sydney’s Olympic Stadium — this year known as ANZ Park. ENVIRONMENTAL CONSTRAINTS

The PA People’s Graeme Janes said one of the major design and installation challenges for the installation at the stadium was to overcome the environmental noise constraints that existed within this structure. After the design process the Bose LT9403 Series III full range loudspeaker was chosen as the main system. The PA People turned to the Bose proprietary Modeler design software program to confirm their choice. Modeler can produce an acoustically correct model of the stadium. Inserting the chosen sound system into the model in the correct location with defined angles and coverage patterns gives the customer the ability to see the coverage patterns of the system and listen to how it will sound before the building is completed.

Graeme Janes said the Bose LT9403 Series III speakers of which 40 were used in the main stadium, were an appropriate choice. This was confirmed at the completion of the project when all testing and measuring confirmed the predicted results from the Bose design tools. The logistics involved in the installation from start to finish included detailed planning over an eight-month period. The cabling was installed early, fitting in with the construction phase of Skilled Park. The hanging of the Bose Panaray LT9403 Series III speakers along the gantry of the spectacular structure signalled the completion of the installation, in time for the first trial football matches in February this year. The LT9403 Series III loudspeaker allows the system designers a high degree of pattern control. The tightly focused coverage minimises the overlap zones often found in conventional arrays. The result is reported to be a clearer sound image, and reduced interference throughout the coverage area of the array particularly in the mid/high frequencies. The enclosure and grille are generally available in black and white but can be painted to blend into almost any environment. Sixteen threaded steel rigging points (four top, four bottom and four on each side) allowed for convenient rigging. Bose: 1800 659 433 or www.bose.com.au

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NEWS

Light Lock At the recent PLASA show in London, the Royal Shakespeare Company — better known for producing interesting versions of the works of William Shakespeare than for its technological innovations — announced the release of new rigging product that went on to win the first ever PLASA Gold Award for product innovation. Developed by the RSC’s Head of Lighting, Vince Herbert, the RSC LightLock is a stabilising device that allows moving luminaires to be rigged on very lightweight hanging or flown structures. “I started working on a bit of this concept when we were working on the refurbishment of the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester,” explains Herbert. “The idea was to put moving lights onto television pantographs so that we could vary the angle of lighting within cues and make them much easier to maintain. However, that didn’t work because of various financial constraints. “When we started talking about the RSC’s auditorium designs for the new Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon (currently undergoing a staggering $275m transformation), Flip Tanner (the Technical Project Co-ordinator) asked me what I really wanted the rig to look like and what we should do with it. I had never forgotten the modular cluster lighting idea, and this was the ideal time to put it into place. It was also driven by health and safety, because in the future we won’t be climbing up to lights using ladders or cherry pickers. We will want the lights to come down to us. So that’s where the thinking started. “However, there is a huge drawback with a small modular lightweight truss system. Basically, if you put a moving light on it, it swings. Flip Tanner and I did an experiment in our Courtyard Theatre to test out how much it would swing and it swung a hell of a lot more than I thought. I realised at that point that I would need to find or design something that would stop the swing. I started to look for it as I assumed someone must have done this already. When I saw no-one had produced one, I realised that it was up to me. I had to come up with it! “In the name of research, I spent a lot of time on a swing in a park in Stratfordupon-Avon. The idea I had was that if you could start yourself swinging by moving your legs, you could stop yourself swinging by moving your legs in the other direction. Testing my theory on the swing must have looked crazy, but it worked. I then had to work on translating this to something that was mechanical and electronic. The theory is that to make something swing you have to put energy into it, so to stop it swinging you put the opposite amount of energy into it. It’s a fairly simple exercise in physics. “Initially I called it the ‘it can’t be done’ system, because everyone I approached said ‘It can’t be done’. When I built the prototype and it worked, people said it was ‘blindingly obvious’ so I called it the ‘It’s blindingly obvious’ system. The hardest thing is trying to persuade people, because everyone assumes that if anything is a good idea it must have been done by somebody else.” The big discovery during that development process was that moving lights really only develop movement about a single axis — essentially the pan axis of the fixture. This enabled the production of a device using just one angular rate sensor to detect the movement of the rigging platform, and a counterbalance mechanism that operates in that single plane. In operation, the RSC LightLock (dimensions: 500mm (W) x 500mm (D) x 80mm (H). Weight: 17kg) has two states: passive and active. In its passive state, the LightLock continually monitors the structure on which it is rigged to ensure that it is absolutely still. When movement is detected because of the repositioning of a moving light, the LightLock becomes active and the movement of the structure is stopped. — Andy Ciddor. LightLock: www.rsc.org.uk

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NEWS

REVIEW

1/HITACHI’S SHORT THROW

2/ TOURGUIDE LEADS WAY

3/ SSPA HIRE FLY DVA WITH QANTAS

Hitachi’s CP-A100 LCD projector features a very short throw distance (60 inches at 1.4 feet), eliminating the problem of presenters obstructing the projected image by standing in front of the screen, it also means there are no shadows interfering with the image and eliminates light in the presenter’s face. Additionally, the CP-A100 offers networking capabilities, allowing multiple projectors to be controlled and monitored from a single location. The CP-A100 can be placed vertically as well as horizontally, as well as inverted for ceiling-mount applications, making positioning of the projector more convenient. The CP-A100 is built for ease of maintenance, as its lamp door is on top of the model, and the filter is located on the back, allowing for easy access. Price: $3900. Hitachi: www.hitachi.com.au

Sennheiser has some additions to its Tourguide 2020D system. The SR 2020-D stationary transmitter and the L2021-40 charging unit complement the familiar HDE 2020-D Stethoset receivers. Also new to the family is the SKM 2020-D handheld transmitter — a high-quality microphone that is a sturdy and reliable partner for guided tours, company presentations and interpreting. Together, these components form a solution for conferences involving interpreting as well as for meetings and presentations in several languages and for assistive listening in theatres and churches. The digital system transmits on up to eight license-free frequencies and is ready for operation immediately with virtually no installation effort. For mobile applications, the SKM2020D handheld transmitter and the SK2020-D bodypack transmitter are available. Syntec: 1800 648 628 or sales@syntec.com.au

The owners of Small Systems Productions Aust (SSPA) have been in the professional audio visual industry for over 30 years, and now preside over a diverse and active business. Small Systems PA Hire had its DB Technologies' DVA system find a home in a Qantas hanger at Sydney Airport for two events during September. The first being the home coming ceremony for the Australian Olympic Team; the second being the delivery of Qantas’ first Airbus A380. Using 16 DVA T4 cabinets alongside two S20 subwoofers with the DRL system lifters, Small Systems managed to get the result they were after. With Channel 7’s Sunrise show and the Today show broadcasting from the hanger, the media splitter was quite complex. Small Systems provided 36 separate media feeds to accommodate everyone on top of their standard left and right. “Everyone was very happy and the whole gig went off without a hitch,” says Chris. Small Systems: www.sspa.com.au CMI: (03) 9315 2244 or www.cmi.com.au

NEWS / BRIEF

The new Tap Tempo controller for the Digidesign Venue D-Show live mix environment is now available. Plug-ins for ProTools have long been able to sync to a master tempo. System 2.7.1 offers the same functionality within Venue’s Mix system. A central system tempo setting can be tapped on the control surface where multiple delay processors can be set at once, each with different delay times. Madison Technologies (Peter Jago): 0437 377 444 or www. madisontech.com

AMX Australia has appointed Jonathan Rutledge to the newly-created role of Consultant Alliance Group Manager. In this role, Jonathan will be dedicated to supporting, assisting and maintaining AMX’s relationship with consultants and key specifiers in Australia and New Zealand and providing high level and day-to-day design, specification and product support to this group on all aspects of the AMX family. AMX Australia: (07) 5531 3103 or www.amxaust.com.au

Audio Telex and Mitsubishi have entered into a subdistribution agreement. Under the agreement, Audio Telex will stock and distribute Mitsubishi’s LCD projectors, LED screens and Cube Walls to their dealer network through their offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and the new Hills SVL office in Canberra. Audio Telex: (02) 9647 1411 or nsw@audiotelex.com.au

Altronic has recently expanded its wholesale operations, opening an office in Eight Mile Plains to cater to the Queensland market. Altronic Distributors are an established national supplier of professional public address & audio visual equipment, with their Creator, Dyna-link and Biema ranges, plus well known Australian-made Redback PA products. They’ve announced the appointment of Daniel Neuss as the Queensland State Manager. Altronic: 1300 780 999 or www.altronic.com.au

The HRT Switch-Cat is an all-in-one AV distribution system. Designed to add serious AV capabilities to any room, the VSA-31-SP device integrates AV switching, microphone input, projector control, and video transmission over UTP, and audio amplification in one package. Madison Technology: 1800 669 999 or av@madisontech.com

3/ NZ PARLIAMENT TALKS UP AUDIO INSTALL The New Zealand Parliamentary Debating Chamber recently underwent a major audio upgrade. Glenn Leembruggen (ICE) was engaged early on to develop a solution that would satisfy the parliament through the next decade. Glenn highlighted intelligibility, coverage and, most importantly, fidelity as the major performance criteria, the aim being to design a sound system that doesn’t sound like a sound system. In addition to the demanding performance criteria, there were many design constraints to contend with, such as weight restrictions, suspension methods, heritage and architectural constraints, a limited time frame and each array had to squeeze into a cylindrical package measuring no more than 350mm (D) x 1750mm (H). Acoustic Technologies was approached early in the process and selected as the manufacturer for the project based on its R&D ability, manufacturing quality and attention to detail. The main floor of the Debating Chamber is covered by six custom engineered multi beam-steered array speakers suspended in a rectangular grid from the ceiling. Although physically identical on the outside, there are actually two different models in use. Each of the six arrays uses multiple five-, three- and twotransducers to steer various segments of the spectrum to the appropriate areas in the chamber. HF information is provided by a number of compression driver/horn combinations in the array. A coaxial two-way speaker for downfill completes the picture. Each array is driven by 22 to 23 individual amplifier channels each with its own DSP channel. The response to the project has been overwhelmingly positive, with feedback from the NZ Parliament suggesting this is potentially the best system of its kind anywhere. Acoustic Technologies: (07) 3376 4122 or www.atprofessional.com

September saw Southern Cross University in Lismore NSW, installing various Yamaha Installation Series products throughout the facility. The equipment list includes an M7CL-32, 32-channel digital live mixing console with the accompanying MBM7CL meter bridge, an LS9-32 64-channel digital live mixing console along with the SP2060 loudspeaker processor. Installation Series Loudspeakers included seven IF2108 eight-inch full-range loudspeakers, a solitary IF2208

dual eight-inch loudspeaker, six IF2112AS single 12-inch full-range asymmetrical horns and four IS1118 single 18-inch subwoofers. The undertaking was facilitated and installed by Musiclab of Brisbane. Yamaha Music Australia: 1800 805413 or www.yamahamusic.com.au

Da-Lite and hi-def boffins, Joe Kane Productions (JKP), have entered into a strategic partnership to design, develop and manufacture High Definition (HD) projection screens for the home theatre and film production markets. Da-Lite has also launched a new line of universal projector and flat panel mounts with its Advance brand. Wilson & Gilkes (02) 9914 0900 or sales@gilkon.com.au

PAINT IS CHEAP. Equipment is not. Neither are racks. Nor labour. The Audio® family of products, including AudiaFLEX and MiniExpanders, reduce these costs by combining multiple isolated systems into a single network. Installations are faster, upgrades are easier and jobs are more profitable. Welcome to the future of networked media systems. Find out more at biamp.com.au

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FEATURE

Enter the Dragon The Red Dragon: fancy boat, money no object. Text: / Graeme Hague

When approached by AV to write an article about a yacht, I jumped at the chance. As a long-time America’s Cup buff, the idea of smashing through mountainous waves on a starboard tack, the sails snapping in a 40-knot gale, the freezing spray soaking my face, some kind of important rope gripped desperately in my teeth… it’s right up there in my collection of favourite fantasies, along with Jennifer Aniston dropping in to visit wearing only a… Well, okay, let’s not go there. Of course, I was soon brought back to earth — or rather dry land. This is an audiovisual magazine [glad that point hasn’t eluded you — Ed.] and while the boat in question is technically a yacht (it has a mast) the nearest it will probably come to any inclement weather will be a DVD of Perfect Storm on any of its 14 display screens. Needless to say, the 52-metre Red Dragon is an ultra-luxurious yacht. Heaven knows how much it cost — one suspects the owner may not even know; but it’d probably be more than you and I are ever likely to see in a lifetime. And who gets the plum job of fitting out a super-sloop like this? Liquid Automation is an Auckland-based company that specialises in marine installations of audiovisual entertainment equipment, automation controls and, not surprisingly, security CCTV to make sure nobody steals them later. For the record, they’ve been so successful in their relatively short business life that they’re already expanding into residential and commercial AV projects as well. The company came into being when directors Bruce Cox and Stephan Goodhue decided to get out of the marine industry and take their talents into the commercial and residential markets. It was only a matter of weeks before they were asked to quote for a yacht project due to their combined experience in that field. The commercial and residential arenas would, for the moment, have to wait. SS LUCKY BASTARD

The Red Dragon posed a range of interesting challenges; some common to most marine AV projects, and one in particular that was almost unique: there was no budget. By ‘no budget’ I mean unlimited. Money was no object, as they say. Now, while many people might dance for joy at the idea of designing and installing an entertainment system with a blank chequebook, there is a downside: you have no excuses. If the owner or any of his passengers ever reduced to slapping the side of a television monitor to fix the fuzzy picture or gnashing their teeth at an unresponsive remote control, the answer can never be, “Well, you should have bought such-and-such instead”. The solutions should have been installed in the first place. However, some kind of after-sales service is inevitable, which could translate into serious frequent-flyer points for the lads at Liquid Automation. Obviously, their clients don’t void their warranty by sailing

Show Boat: Aft deck showing Stewart screen and Runco projector.

FEATURE

023

“If the owner or any of his passengers are ever reduced to slapping the side of a television monitor to fix the fuzzy picture, the answer can never be, ‘Well, you should have bought such-and-such instead’”

024

FEATURE

Owner's cabin with 57-inch electric lift screen, wireless control tablet and the Kaleidescape media server.

beyond Auckland harbour. The Red Dragon pre-empts any customer complaints by sensing and analysing any system failures, initialising the required back-up equipment and then if things get really serious it automatically emails a report of the malfunction back to Liquid Automation. It can happen almost without the skipper even knowing, or missing a single minute of his Gilligan’s Island re-runs — and that’s from any part of the world. AUTOMATED EVERYTHING

While we’re on the subject of globe-trotting, each TV on Red Dragon has four separate tuners, two digital and two analogue, to cover the different TV formats around the world. The selection of appropriate tuners is made for the whole vessel via the LCD touch panel in the pilothouse. Despite the complexities, their systems are expected to be reliable, user-friendly, intuitive and simple to operate. Everything else will happen seamlessly in the background. The heart of the yacht’s AV system is an eight terabyte Kaleidescape KServer 1500 that’s used for storage of movies, music or anything else you might consider entertainment. The content is distributed to K-Player nodes at 14 different screen locations throughout the Red Dragon — and a number of other audio-only areas — using fibre-optic cabling to reduce weight and prevent interference. Mostly these are Aquavision and NEC LCD screens ranging from 57-inch NEC models for the master cabin and saloon area to 17-inch displays for the unwashed, scurvy-ridden crew in their own quarters. A theatre-style area on the aft deck has a custom-built, motorised Stewart screen with an overhead-mounted Runco

projector. Each display point is controlled by a touchscreen, which can also integrate with iPod docks installed in many of the sections. It’s a little mind-boggling that with 8000GB of music and film at your fingertips someone’s going to say, “No thanks, I’m going to listen to my iPod”… mind you, strange things can happen at sea. SCREEN PROFILE

The Aquavision screens are a clever design that bears in mind that boats don’t generally have internal walls with wide cavities or space to conceal the rear workings of a television and provide for ventilation. Their thinner profile is achieved by allowing the circuit’s heat to dissipate through the front glass. Every Aquavision’s signal is first processed by a Lumagen video scaler, raising the quality to high definition. All the audio is surround sound where it’s practical. Everyone on the Red Dragon can access their own entertainment preference at any time — that’s a pretty demanding system. Marshalling it all are five Crestron controllers, but only four of these are dedicated to the entertainment media. The fifth supplies a feed of the yacht’s navigation radars, chart displays and the depth sounder for anybody who’s interested in such trifling matters as the nearest hurricane or how much water is under the keel. And if that’s not enough for you — and you can’t be bothered getting out of your hammock to look out the porthole — pictures of the outside world are streamed from three cameras: a thermal imaging camera up the mast, one on the spreader and a pan-tilt model on the mast head that can be operated by dragging your finger across the touchscreen.

WAVE FILES

With so much going on, protecting the Kaleidescape stored media files is a high priority. Keeping things in line is Kaleidescape’s proprietary RAID-K system that was developed for their servers. RAID-K has similarities to RAID 5, but it doesn’t use block-level striping of file data. Instead, it attempts to keep each movie or music album wholly contained on a single disk. Also, the redundant parity information may exist on more than one drive in order to accommodate a mixture of different sizes of disks. There is also more than just parity data in the redundant information used to achieve fault tolerance. It all adds up to better performance for movies and music with an extra level of safety. Finally, RAID-K permits the user to incrementally add storage capacity, including disks that already contain content (movies or music) which are automatically added into the RAID-K array and the Kaleidescape file system. Should the Red Dragon wander into the Bermuda Triangle and things go really crazy, a hot spare disk cartridge is installed in the server that is immediately available as a replacement for any drive that fails. The server continues to operate. No content or user-entered data is lost, and information stored on the failed drive is restored to the hot spare. There’s no need for any urgent service call to get the system back on-line, which is handy as the Red Dragon might be floating somewhere off the Greek Islands (damn!). Still, the failed disk cartridge should be replaced as soon as practical with a unit that simply becomes the new hot spare. The hot spare disk cartridge is not only an

FEATURE

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026

FEATURE

All Ahead Full: The Red Dragon relies on a Crestron system to control the audiovisual elements, but as can be seen (left) there are other elements to consider… like where the boat's headed and how deep the water is. (Far left) An equipment rack of this type can be found lurking in almost every cupboard.

extra layer of data protection. In most RAID setups when a drive fails, the server is at risk of losing content if a second drive drops out, too — not uncommon given that something must have damaged the first one. With a hot spare, the system begins restoring itself immediately to full operation, rather than just trying to hold the fort until a technician arrives. SALT & BATTERIES

Environmentally, the greatest enemy of the AV system isn’t the salt air or movement of the yacht; it’s the extremes of temperature a cruising boat can encounter in different climates. All 18 racks that make up the system have their own air handlers with Crestnet temperature and humidity sensors on each. When 40 degrees is reached, warning messages are displayed on the crew’s display screens only. At 45 degrees the Red Dragon again takes matters into her own hands, breaks out the virtual life jackets by powering down that rack and emailing an SOS to Liquid Automation. Last, and certainly not least with such a system, since earth loops are a real threat floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean [that’s a kind of joke, right? — Ed.] the AV equipment is powered by its own dedicated grid backed by a massive UPS. Complementing the whole concept, the

Red Dragon has Lutron lighting control integrated in to the Crestron system so that lighting too can be programmed and automated to create the best ambience for watching your film of choice. So all this only left me with one question. Who the hell is going to sit around uploading eight terabytes of music and movies into the system? And in the unlikely event you want something new, who does the updates? Kaleidescape have the answer by selling entire libraries loaded on disk modules that plug into spare slots in the K-Server. A DEADSET BEAUTY

No doubt you could paddle around Monte Carlo during the Grand Prix and see a hundred boats like the Red Dragon. Maybe even bigger, maybe even better. And to be honest the fact she was built and fitted out in Auckland is no great surprise, because New Zealand has a long and proud reputation as having some of the best boat-builders in the world. All the same, I’ll have to admit that if the Red Dragon were to sail me to the most exotic, beautiful locations on the seven seas, you’ll probably still find me below decks playing with the AV system. She’s a beauty.  Photography by Jamie Cobeldick courtesy of Trends Publishing International.

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028

FEATURE

Olympic Lighting Control Controlling the biggest live gig in the world on just three grandMAs? Text & images: / Paul Collison Control System & Broadcast Lighting Consultant to BOCOG ceremonies

Congratulations! You’ve just been given the honour of illuminating the biggest show in the world. This show will be viewed by billions of people around the globe. You get to choose between all sorts of different lights and other toys to play with for months on end. You can choose fixtures from different manufacturers that have different attributes and cover many jobs in an array of styles. But what do you use to control your lighting system? This is the question that Mr Sha Xioa Lan had to answer after his appointment as Lighting Designer for the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the XXIX Olympic Games in Beijing. It would be safe to say that the control system is the lynch pin in the success of a production. Lights breakdown: that is a fact of life. We expect this and, if we’re wise, we prepare for it. However a control system

simply must not fail. Of course, we run backup consoles and try to account for different variables, but the fact is, a ‘tracking back-up’ console is an integral part of the modern day control system. Otherwise, it’s really not a system. There are a plethora of questions to ask, and decisions to be made when selecting a control system for such a large-scale event. What products have been tried and tested? What are the back-up capabilities within the proposed control system? How does the system distribute and process information? What kind of back-up service should you expect from the manufacturer? How many people in the country actually know how to use the proposed system? Then there is the inevitable: how much does it cost? With the distances that needed to be covered for this event, signal latency was

something that needed to be considered from the outset. Data had to arrive at every lighting fixture in the system at exactly the same time. Immediately, any system that relies solely on ArtNet to distribute its signal was discounted. ArtNet is a fantastic interim protocol while we wait for a true successor to DMX, however its major failing is that it is a centralised, broadcast protocol. Broadcasting ArtNet from a centralised source to such a widely spread rig was not the answer. GRANDMA – THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN

This left only a few possible options in the current market, and of these, MA lighting’s grandMA was the only real contender. The grandMA system decentralises its processing of information across every device in the network which ensures frame-accurate output of DMX across the entire system.

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This means a snap to black will not look staggered throughout the stadium while different devices across the network receive and process information. To facilitate this, MA has developed its own networking protocol called MA Net. The MA control system was officially selected in January 2008. Although there was plenty of experience in China with using the MA system, there was not a comfortable amount of expertise in the networking side of large-scale outdoor events. I was approached to join the team in December 2007 because my previous experience on large-scale public events and thorough knowledge of the MA system made me an ideal addition to an already experienced team. Patching a system of this scale is no mean feat. Once all the lighting fixtures are chosen and located on a drawing, the task of allocating

fixture IDs (the numbers in which we identify lights, not the DMX address) and allocating DMX streams and addresses begins. Simply numbering the fixtures 1 through to 2500 or so is not an intuitive way to do things. Using the model numbers of the lamps as a reference can help everyone on the team to identify fixtures easily without the need to dive for the nearest folder or lighting plan. In our system, the Clay Paky Alpha 1200s were IDs 1201 thru 1312. Mac 2000 washes started at 2001. VL3000s started at 3001. JUST HOW MANY COOKS DO YOU NEED?

When the time came to allocate the fixtures across consoles, the initial thought was to have 10 operators. However, the lighting designer can only work properly with one operator at a time, and sometimes only one operator can â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;have the floorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; to do his/her

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thing. After considering this, it was decided that less was more. As each operator on a grandMA network can run up to a maximum of 16,384 parameters in their own session, and the entire lighting system was to consist of slightly fewer than 47,000 parameters, we needed a minimum of three operators. Although the configuration virtually filled each session, after careful discussion and analysis it was decided that running with three operators would be the best way to go. After careful consideration, the final breakdown of which fixtures to allocate to each session, had all of the Mac 2000 washes in the roof in the first session. The second session had every other wash light in the rig, while the third session contained all of the profile fixtures. Allocation of the network termination points needed to be considered before we

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What the consultant designed: neat racks of NSPs, switches and UPSs for the roof of the stadium.

What the budget provided: an office-grade UPS, a supermarket-grade powerboard and lots of cable ties.

could properly allocate DMX streams and addresses. Ultimately 14 locations around the stadium were selected: six in the roof, two on the level-three balcony, three on the level-two balcony, two on the field of play and one in the central pit. When it came to allocating DMX addresses, many factors needed to be considered. Minimising cable runs was a major issue. Jumping DMX streams between trusses was a definite no-no. Standardisation is something that makes things easy, so keeping a pattern or a flow to things to enable quick and efficient fault finding was also a major consideration. With four people working on it, the DMX allocation process took almost three days. This included allocating DMX addresses, updating the lighting plans and giving every fixture a location in the 3D world to utilise the wireframe visualiser and grandMA 3D.

Optical fibre can be a tricky medium to use. On projects such as this, a military or tactical-grade fibre would be preferred, as the ruggedness of this type of fibre would prove resilient to most of the rough treatment you would expect cable to receive over months in a temporary installation. Once again, for budgetary reasons, a much more brittle, install-grade, single-mode fibre was chosen. This meant that everywhere the fibre was exposed to the possibility of wear and tear or human interaction; a protective conduit had to be put in place. This was quite a labour intensive solution, but acceptable nonetheless. In mid May, 10 weeks before the first ceremony, this fibre backbone in the stadium was brought online. Following this, the lighting system was gradually brought online and tested. A seamless handover took place on June 14, around eight weeks before the opening ceremony. This now put the design team and programmers in the hot seat and the network monitoring and systems people in a holding pattern waiting for issues and problems to solve.

AND NOW FOR THE NETWORK NEWS…

At this point in the project, all the plans were handed to the production companies responsible for installing the lighting fixtures. Planning on the control side then moved over to the specifications for the fibre optic network. In the original design, a Cisco network with passive data flow, redundant power supplies, networkable UPSs and environmental monitoring was specified. This system had the advantage of being able to pass data passively, so that if there was a power outage in a particular location, the information flow around the network would not be compromised. Other benefits of that network included better redundancy options for power and superior local knowledge and training. Ultimately, due to budget constraints and equipment availability, a less sophisticated, and slightly less faulttolerant, solution using HP networking gear was agreed upon, and installation began in April 2008.

GETTING DOWN TO PROGRAMMING

During this period everyone settles in to a daily pattern. Mid to late afternoon is when the first wave of crew arrive at the stadium to power up the system. They check for faults and test each and every lighting fixture. The programmers and designers arrive in not long after, and shortly after that programming begins. Each night there are segment rehearsals where cues are rehearsed and different looks are tried. Some nights we placed consoles at various locations around the stadium so as to give the programmers and designers a different view of the stadium. Depending on the flow of the creative juices, programming could continue until sun-up (around 4.30am) or could finish as early as 1 or 2am. This was pretty much the routine

Above: NSPs and switch. Note safety cable and string. Right: Not everyone gets to party.

right up until the opening ceremony. The programming style of the Chinese operators was a little different to what we would normally expect for a show of this scale. SMPTE timecode was abandoned at the request of creative director Zhang Ymo. His belief was that the performers were not timecoded so therefore the lighting cues needed to be variable to account for this. Although other departments used the available SMPTE timecode to trigger cues, in the lighting department every cue was manually executed. The other point of difference was the fact the operators placed each cue on a separate fader rather than in long sequences. A seasoned operator will tell you that a sequence is the best way to lay out a cue-tocue show to have better control of the fixtures and a better understanding of how the show is laid out. However, this was not the way it was to be done in Beijing. The result was that each recorded cue contained the information for every attribute for over 800 moving lights per session. This ultimately lead to large show files, but despite this, the system was remarkably stable and network integrity was not an issue. BUT WILL IT REALLY FLY?

Counting down to the opening ceremony, tensions were high. This was China’s big moment to shine. For months or even years, the eyes of the world had been on China, and more specifically Beijing, to see what they could come up with. After spending months looking at the same show and rehearsing with an almost monotonous regularity, it’s easy to lose perspective and not see just how special or amazing the final product is. There was definitely an air of trepidation going in to the show. Afterwards the sense of relief was amazing, but the scale of the success didn’t sink in for a day or so. Not until glowing media reports came in and

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Lighting Control

Above: Control console visualisation schematic. (Right) Pre-plotting using visualisation software.

internet forums were abuzz with excitement. Only then did the team really begin to truly understand just how well all their hard work had been received. Of course, it’s totally normal on an event like this that a day or so after the big Opening Ceremony that everyone realises that there is a closing to be done. It’s never surprising that the closing ceremony is treated as the poor cousin to the opening. With the turnaround to athletics in the stadium, and then the actual athletics events, there is very little time to prepare for the closing ceremony. Consequently the design and programming team went into the closing with very few programmed cues. It’s scary to imagine how someone busks a show with a few thousand lights. However, this is exactly how the closing ceremony went. As in the opening ceremony, the show went as expected (or more precisely: as hoped). This time the sense of relief was far greater as by now the team could safely say that they had successfully pulled off two of the biggest shows the world had ever seen. RISING EAST

Despite any outside questions about their ability to handle the Olympics ceremonies,

China is no stranger to large-scale theatrical events. The Opening Ceremony of the 2008 World Table Tennis Championship in China was as large as any Eurovision song contest you would care to see and probably seen by as many viewers. This was reflected in the amount of ‘western’ or foreign help there was for these games. Early on in the project there were countless names thrown about. Spielberg was one, Robert Dickenson another, and there were plenty more. These masters of their crafts were certainly heavily involved early on. Ultimately, the Chinese realised this was a show they could produce themselves; both technically and creatively. In the end, there were only a dozen or so foreign crew in the entire ceremonies team. Compare this to the hundreds in Athens and dozens and dozens in Sydney. The overseas talent brought to Beijing were mainly there as a backstop to the competent locals. On top of the already spectacular show, the most amazing part was that this was a true Chinese production. So when you think back on the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the 2008 Olympic Games, remember that this show gave a true representation of what China has to offer. 

3 x grandMA full size 3 x grandMA full size as backups 2 x grandMA light as remote surfaces for focusing 44 x MA Network Signal Processors (NSP) Session 1 (Red): 15921 Parameters. 834 Fixtures on 14 x NSP Session 2 (Green): 13503 Parameters, 884 Fixtures on 16 x NSP Session 3 (Blue): 15987 Parameters, 624 Fixtures on16 x NSP

3D Visualisation Software – E.S.P Vision & MA3D Hardware – MA Media PC. NVidia GeForce 8800GTX

MA Video System Three Graphic input cards to overlay the displays from each session in to one.

Network HP Pro-Curve 2626 Field Switches Main Switch HP Pro-Curve 8212zl Kilometers of Multi Mode Fiber

Luminaires 112 x Clay Paky Alpha Wash 980 x Martin Mac 2000 Wash 162 x Martin Mac 2000 XB Wash 308 x Vari*Lite 3500 Spot 316 x Vari*Lite 3000 Spot 180 x Vari*Lite 3500 Wash 12 x High End Show Gun 20 x Ushio 2k Xenon Follow Spot 16 x Kupo Super Sol 3k Xenon Follow Spot 8 x Robert Juliat Lancelot 4kw HTI follow spot 8 x Robert Juliat Cyrano 2.5kW HMI follow spot 204 x PureLight City Color 80 x FineArt Fine2000 Wash 32 x FineArt LED Par Can 46 x Sliver Star LED bank

The Metamorphosis of Distributed Audio Conventional distributed audio with amplifiers and long lines of speakers has ruled ceiling cavities for many a long year – but that’s about to change.... You’re familiar with the www, well here’s the WWAW the ‘WorldWide Audio Web.’ Just like the www each component in the WWAW, ie. each speaker/group of speakers, can be individually addressed, individually zoned, moved between zones, be included in multiple

It’s Klotz Digitals’ Varizone. System size and complexity is virtually limitless making it ideal for venues like transport terminals, convention centres, stadiums, shopping malls and public facilities. It’s already controlling and distributing audio around the

Join us on the Klotz Digital WWAW! Klotz Digital Varizone – Distributed in Australia by TAG. More info? Ph. (02) 9519 0900 Email. info@tag.com.au www.klotzdigital.com

zone overlays and all of the above can be done on or off line with a rather user friendly GUI. Each speaker/amp module is hooked up with CAT5 and matrixing/controlling/monitoring, right down to individual speaker EQs, delays, volumes, etc., is all done at the front end by a very capable processor. Speaker power also runs through the CAT5 with the whole network being flooded by one or more PSU’s.

world at, for example, Munich Airport, Bolshoi Theatre, Wembley Stadium, The European Parliament and Quin Huang Dao Olympic Stadium and in Australia at Star City Casino (Sydney), Parliament of Victoria and most recently Central Station (Sydney).

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If The Chemistry is Right No need to dodge flying dusters. Text: / Christopher Holder

If ever a couple of photos demonstrates the radical changes in education then flick quickly overleaf. Exhibit A (in black & white): a chemistry lecture theatre with a pull-down blackboard, an overhead projector and a slide projector. And as for the pre-war seating? My backside is feeling sore just thinking about at them. This is one lecture theatre where you half expect a Francis Cricktype to wander in muttering inanities about ‘double strands’ or some such… but amazingly this picture dates all the way back to early last year! Exhibit B: Now witness the spanking new Chemistry Learning Lab. What a transformation! Students sit eight to a ‘pod’, each equipped with a screen, a document camera, and the ability to plug in a laptop for internet access and information sharing. Meanwhile, the lecturer has run of the room with a phalanx of 52inch Sony Bravia X Series LCDs, and an AMX Net Op system that allows him/her to monitor students’ progress. NO NEED TO LECTURE

Impetus for the new room and the new approach to learning came from Associate Professor of Chemistry, Peter Tregloan: “Previously, first-year chemistry students would attend a weekly

problem-solving class. Generally, these were held in small lecture theatre (like you see pictured), and, not surprisingly, these classes turned into small lectures. Engagement, discussion and interaction were all difficult in that environment. With the refit we’ve sought to provide an environment that encourages more collaboration and discussion. So now the active learning is far more active, while before it was a case of ‘watch me as I show you what you should learn’.” Delighted with the results and feedback from the Learning Lab transformation, the Chemistry School at Melbourne has set about making changes to other classrooms. Most recently, the first-year chemistry labs have been decked out with the Sony 52-inch hi-def GXD-L52H1 LCDs (supplied by Soundcorp). These screens, some 14 in all, fulfill two purposes. Eight are for presentation purposes, where the tutor can spark up an iMac, and load up a Powerpoint presentation to demonstrate an experiment. The demonstrator talks over the Powerpoint presentation, stopping and starting the visuals as and when applicable. The new technology has some obvious advantages over a whiteboard. A high standard of presentation is all but assured and the details of

the procedure are just as visible to each and every class member. In addition to the presentation screens there are a further six 52inch Sony LCD panels in a digital signage capacity — ‘Wear Your Goggles’, ‘Science Ball Tickets on Sale Now’… the screens (configured into two zones of three screens each) are fed via a laptop input or document camera with oversight from an AMX control system. I spoke to Melbourne Uni’s Carlo Sgro (a senior on-campus IT tech), the job’s consultant Nikesh Kapadia from CHW Consulting, and Andrew Memmolo from the integrator, Spaceage Communications. LABATORY ASSISTANCE AV: Why

the hi-def screens? None of the sources are hi-def, but I was trying to futureproof the job — things will be going hi-def shortly. The Sony screens have other advantages. For example, there’s a protective layer applied to the screens, which is a real advantage — mysterious substances can accidentally find themselves flying across the room. AV: And how have you configured the screens’ I/O? Nikesh Kapadia: These Sony screens allow you to specify the cards. We needed an additional BNC card, and we’ve got a Cat5 card to Carlo Sgro:

Looking up: The demonstrator loads up a Powerpoint file on the iMac and calls the class' attention to the Sony 52-inch LCD.

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connect up the screens to the AMX control system. The cards are easily inserted, and if something happens to go wrong then they’re just as easily swapped out. AV: They’re a good looking screen… NK: Yes, and they’ve got discrete speakers tucked in behind the screens. So, from the front, all you see is a nice thin bezel but the facility for audio is there without any further effort. AV: And they’re some serious looking brackets. CS: Finding the right brackets was a challenge. The needed to hold the weight (around 60kg) and provide freedom of movement. They’re from Premier Mounts — very sturdy and the cable management is excellent. AV: Was the integration smooth sailing Andrew? Andrew Memmelo: I don’t think any integration is easy — we had to wait a period for AMX to talk to the Sony Screens, and the cards for the screens were late in coming — but we managed to get everything programmed and running on time. AV: Is the AMX control system working hard? AM: In this case it’s used more in a basic power management capacity and to improve the ease of use for the client. Saying that, the AMX RMS system allows Melbourne Uni to monitor the usage of the room and the screens — so there’s a management aspect to the system as well.  CHW Consulting: (03) 9670 0878 or www.chwconsulting.com.au Spaceage Communications: 1800 032 482 or www.spaceage.com.au Soundcorp: (03) 9694 2600 or www.soundcorp.com.au Switching on: The new Learning Lab could hardly be more different from the cranky old lecture theatre of yore (inset). (Right) A heavy screen (~60kg) needs a hefty mount. These ones are from Premier Mounts.

Distributed in Australia by: Magna Systems and Engineering, Unit 2, 28 Smith Street, Chatswood, NSW 2067 Australia Tel: (02) 9417 1111 Fax: (02) 9417 2394

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Rear Projection All At Sea Thanks to some rear projection Sea Patrol doesn’t miss the boat. Text: / Gep Blake Images: / Technical Direction Company

“Say, let’s go for a drive!” said Arthur. “Why that’s a swell idea!” exclaimed Jane with an excited smile. As they sat bouncing around in their little red convertible, laughing into the wind from an industrial fan that blew their hair every which way, the streets of Napoli rolled past behind them… washed out, black and white and in two charming but very flat dimensions. Interestingly, it was really the streets of Rome that rolled past Jane in close up, but never mind. At least they looked like they were having fun. Ah, the exuberance of youth! PLATES — JUST IMAGINE

Rear projection plates (the screen onto which the image is projected is referred to as the plate) in film and television are not a new concept, in fact they’ve been around since the introduction of ‘talkies’. A science fiction musical comedy (I kid you not) called Just Imagine produced by Fox Film Corporation in 1930 is generally credited as the first film to utilise a large-scale rear projection effect. Technological advances, such as brighter projection lamps and the ability to synchronise several projectors and cameras to eliminate flicker, led to rear projection quickly gaining popularity among filmmakers over the ensuing decades. Most notably used for portraying travelling shots — in planes, trains, automobiles and the like — rear projection may have required a large sound stage, but it was cheaper and safer than shooting on location. As long as audiences were willing to suspend their disbelief and accept that flat look, often accompanied by dreadful discrepancies of lighting and movement between the live action and the plate, rear projection ruled. We’ve all seen the backgrounds hopelessly mismatching the live performance in those classic late-night movies and more recently it’s even been exploited for great comedic effect by Mike Meyers and others. Blue

screen and travelling matte techniques were also being developed in the 1930s, but they were expensive and time consuming. The big advantage of rear projection was the camera filming the live action did not need to be locked down, and once the scene was shot, it was ‘in the can’ with no additional post-production required. For producers on a tight budget, the choice was simple. As computer-generated images and various keying and matting technologies have revolutionised film and television special effects over the last three decades, projection was becoming a tool more widely used in live functions and events. However, behind the scenes, those very same computerbased imaging technologies have quietly been finding their way into rear projection. The plate is back, but this time it looks fabulous. HMAS INTREPID SOUND STAGE

Channel Nine’s drama Sea Patrol began shooting in September 2006, with the second series now on air. The story revolves around life on HMAS Hammersley, a fictitious Australian naval patrol boat. The boat used for the series is a real Royal Australian Navy patrol boat, HMAS Ipswich, rebadged for the drama. While most of the series was shot on location off the coast of Queensland, a full-size replica of the ship’s bridge was built on a sound stage in Warner Studios on the Gold Coast. The bridge scenes involving other vessels were shot on the real boat at sea, but the other bridge scenes were shot in the set. A state-of-the-art rear projection system was designed and built by Technical Direction Company (TDC) to simulate the ocean view from the cabin. The set was mounted on a turntable that could be rotated to achieve a variety of different camera angles. This required the projection plates to accommodate a very large angle of view. Made from Stewart AeroView 100 flexible rear projection screen material, the 22m by

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;It provided a far more realistic environment for the actors. So much so, in fact, that some of the cast actually got seasick in the studio.â&#x20AC;?

Bridge set with sunset plates up on the screen.

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1. The set is mounted on a castor system to reposition it against screen. 2. Setting up for a shoot. 3. Three pairs of projectors are blended for the panoramic backdrop. 4. An alignment grid is projected to adjust for distortion.

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6m screen was mounted on a curved support structure. AeroView 100 has excellent edge blending characteristics, excellent white field uniformity and a claimed viewing cone of 180 degrees – attributes which made it a good choice for the task. 20,000 ANSI LUMEN, DOUBLE STACKED

Six Barco FLM R20+ 20,000 ANSI lumen projectors were used to get the image on to the plate. The projectors were configured as three stacked-pairs to achieve the required light levels on the screen. Once they were converged and edge blended the resulting image was both bright and consistent. Because of the curved screen, each projector had a dedicated Folsom ScreenShaper video mapping processor to compensate for image distortion. Toby Waley who managed the project for TDC explains: “The curved projection system is something we have done for a couple of years now, so most of the challenges we had dealt with previously. “The ScreenShaper processors require physical dots to be positioned on the screen for line up. The issues with this are not just limited to the time it takes to measure and attach these dots, but how we attach the dots. Using little green paper dots can leave a residue that will damage the surface. “TDC has developed a proprietary process that enables us to position these dots and align the projection system in a much shorter time. We estimate that we shaved around 20 man hours off the setup process with this new black box technology.” The plates were shot with four High Definition Sony 900R cameras, mounted on the front deck of the Armidale Class patrol boat, HMAS Broome. Two cameras were facing forward and one each was facing port and starboard. Visual effects supervisor Soren Jenson from The Lab then interlaced the plates to create a panoramic seascape and treated some to create additional full sun, sunrise, sunset and night effects. The projected image was replayed from a Sony SRW-5000 HDCAM SR deck feeding an anamorphic HD-SDI signal into two Vista Systems Spyder video processors.

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ALL GOOD, TOO QUEASY

So, why go to all this trouble, rather than just setting up a big chroma key? One of the advantages of a rear projection setup like this was that Director of Photography Russel Bacon was able to effectively see the final image and light the bridge set accordingly. It also provided a far more realistic environment for the actors. So much so, in fact, that some of the cast actually got seasick in the studio. Toby Waley again: “this process yields a more natural result due to the real light sources, combined with a saving in cost. We discussed recently what we could do to improve the process, and at the risk of sounding arrogant, we all agreed this solution worked well. Maybe too well for some of the actors. So there is no need for us to re-invent the wheel should we take on a similar project again.” OTHER APPLICATIONS IN THE SAME BOAT AV asked Toby how difficult it was to get all this together and how a rear projection setup like this for film or television would differ from what he might use in a live context – a large conference or a concert for example. “They are very similar from our perspective; although we notice that the film or television client will tend to put more attention to detail into the content creation being exactly spot on. The guys from Sea Patrol were really on the ball when it came to creating true pixel-for-pixel content, and maintaining the highest resolution possible. They all spoke the same language that we do in terms of pixel management, so it was a real pleasure dealing with them. “We package our various technologies in ‘Modules’ so it’s easy to create flexible and unique solutions, without re-inventing the wheel for every show. In the case of Sea Patrol 2, we combined our Curved Screen Projection module, with our High-Res Wide-Screen switching system, and a High-Res MediaPlayout rack. When you combine these three components with techs that know how to put them together and engineer the equipment properly, the rest just falls into place and the results speak for themselves.” 

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Assault On The Senses The Australian War Memorial’s most recent exhibit brings our military history very much to life. Text: / Jonathan Ciddor

The Australian War Memorial has no shortage of great stories that lie at the heart of our national heritage. Its most recent project ‘Conflicts 1945 to Today’ covers the period from the Korean War (1950-53) through to our current presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. It tells the great stories from the Vietnam conflict through three elements: an Iroquois helicopter, the operations bridge from the HMAS Brisbane and the Long Tan theatre. Bruce Brown of Mental Media, who produced the major audiovisual content for this new gallery, sees its role as encouraging visitors to suspend reality and engage them in the stories. HELIBORNE ASSAULT EXHIBIT

The Heliborne Assault exhibit places you as a member of an infantry patrol about to be inserted into a patrol zone by Huey (a Bell UH-1B Iroquois helicopter). You receive the pre-flight briefing, then it’s up and away, across the skies in a close formation of Hueys. The sights, the noise, the wind from the rotors, the fusillade of ground fire. It’s all there, and in ever increasing intensity. Then, in an instant you are on the ground, the Hueys are gone, and the all pervading silence of the landing zone overwhelms you. You and your mates are all alone with an unseen hostile enemy. Designing an exhibit that incorporates a full-size Iroquois helicopter (14 metres long

and originally weighing 4.5 tonnes) taking off and landing every seven to 10 minutes, 364 days each year presents a number of challenges. As the Iroquois is right next to the Long Tan Theatre, audio isolation must be added to the list. The layout of the Iroquois exhibit has gone a long way to create isolation. As a backing to the exhibit, running the length of the Iroquois, is a near-rectangular screen extending four metres up from the floor. In addition to providing a spectacular series of scene-setting images that place the Iroquois in a flight with its contemporaries, the screen is tilted back slightly. Not only does this assist the projection angle, but importantly it also aids the acoustics. It’s a trick that works well to deflect the spurious reflected audio into the floor and into the ceiling. There is a similar screen across the end of the exhibit, also tilted, and also irregular in shape. The multi-projector alignment through Dataton Watchout software is a work of art. DUST OFF

Interspersed between each Heliborne Assault is a very moving show about a ‘Dust Off’ (a helicopter medical evacuation). While researching the script for this exhibit, a lowquality radio logging tape was uncovered. It reveals the poignant account of an urgent medical evacuation of a soldier who stepped on a landmine, losing both legs. The short voice messages between the distressed patrol on the ground, air traffic control, the two

Huey pilots and the base hospital, unfolds into a web of tragedy as four soldiers, a medic and a captain are lost when Huey #93B goes down. The chilling soundtrack, edited down to 10 minutes is delivered through a 20-channel sound system peaking at 110dB, with the final mix done live in the exhibit by Resonant Design’s Nigel Frayne. Original footage is carefully interspersed with HD re-enactment footage shot specifically for this exhibit. The lighting for the Iroquois exhibit includes Martin MX-10 moving mirror projectors, Mac 700 profile spots and a very interesting use of Martin Maniac effects. The rotating barrel mirror on the Maniac is used to simulate the effect of the ground moving below the Huey. HMAS BRISBANE

You step through a watertight bulkhead and onto the bridge of the guided missile destroyer HMAS Brisbane. It’s not a set, it’s the actual bridge that was cut off the Brisbane before it retired to become a dive wreck. Standing on the bridge, behind the coxswain’s chair, staring out to sea, you are transported to 1970, off the coast of Vietnam, where HMAS Brisbane was tasked to shell the coastline. LCD panels replace the Bridge’s observation windows with a seascape of the coastline, tracking with the change in bearings you hear called by the

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The Heliborne Assault takes viewers through the drama of a drop into a hostile landing zone.

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Officer of the Watch. In a stroke of genius, moving reflections of the crew can be seen in the LCD panels, bringing to life the ghost voice tracks. The footage for these ‘reflections’ required a seven camera shoot, and involved a cast in original uniforms and voice tracks with period accents, phrasings and voice procedures. The real trick was the variation in angle and apparent focal length to match their physical placement as a reflection in the appropriate LCD panel. A second show places you in the Arabian Gulf during the 1990 Gulf War, where HMAS Brisbane was on Plane Guard providing antiaircraft defence in the aircraft carrier screen. This show required different uniforms, seascapes, phrasing, terminology and voice procedures. The seascapes were created as computergenerated images and then the reflections were overlaid. This was generated at 1920 x 1080 per panel and the resultant digital image, nearly 14,000 pixels wide, was generated on a render farm then split into the seven individual LCD panel images. The lighting on the bridge requires minimal and graduated light levels in order to deliver the reflection images. The audio is

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presented as a soundscape delivered through 10 channels of Bose white FS3 cubes secreted around the ceiling. The final mix was, again, performed on site by Nigel Frayne. The ‘rivet counters’ (the arbiters of authenticity) have given the entire HMAS Brisbane exhibit a resounding thumbs up. LONG TAN THEATRE

The presentation of the story ‘A Letter Home’ is accompanied by high quality video images of the Battle of Long Tan, which took place on the 17th and 18th of August 1966. In fact, the quality seems far too good for a handheld camera in the heat of battle in a rubber plantation during a tropical thunderstorm. But as more images fly off the screen it’s easy to suspend any disbelief as you become engrossed in the emotion of Private Alan May’s letter to his mother a week after the battle, describing the raw emotion of the 12 hours of the Battle of Long Tan. The story is so simply told and the facts so devastating that you probably won’t question how it was possible for a cameraman to get shots of the embattled members of 10, 11, and 12 platoons of Delta Company, 6 Royal Australian Regiment under heavy fire. You

may not notice the beautifully framed shot of the artillery observer as he directs the Australian artillery support shells ever closer to their own position and onto the advancing Viet Cong troops. The facts are easy to recount, but difficult to comprehend. Three Australian platoons, with 17 dead and 25 wounded. Three North Vietnamese battalions with 245 dead and 1455 wounded. Although the Australians were resupplied by helicopter drops, by the end of the battle the entire Delta company had only 40 rounds of ammunition left between them, and only five members of 11 platoon were not either wounded or dead. The high definition re-enactment footage used in the show was produced in a five-day shoot with a film crew of 30 in a hardwood plantation in Mackay, Queensland. Most of the cast were serving members of the Australian Army who were dressed and armed with items from the AWM collection, including armoured personnel carriers. The armoury for the shoot required blank and live fire from all weapons, with the footage of the 25-pound artillery guns recorded on a firing range.

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(Left) The reclaimed bridge of HMAS Brisbane. (Above) The Battle of Long Tan is under the microscope via the ‘A Letter Home’ exhibit.

In the name of authenticity, great enthusiasm was applied to reproduce the impact of the sound of the exploding artillery shells. The 5.1 sound system of Electrovoice ZX1 full range and EV CP2200 sub speakers driven by Dynacord PCL415 amplifiers could handle it with no problem at all. However, in the surrounding exhibits, precious collection items were found to be walking around the shelves of their display cases until compromise levels were set. GHOST IN THE MACHINES

Following the great success of the large-scale World War II AV displays Mini Sub and G for George, Alex Smythe, the AWM’s Head of AV and his staff had significant involvement in the planning process to ensure the new exhibits were easily operated and supported, utilised common componentry and were designed on a flexible, reconfigurable infrastructure base that could support their operational regime of 364 days each year. To facilitate fast and simple maintenance processes that keep the exhibits operational, AWM has adopted a standard PC upon which it mounts its control systems. PCs can and do fail, but the key benefit of the

standard machine lies in the Ghost replica of each system stored on CD. This allows a failed system to be swapped out for a cloned PC in under half an hour. All AV techs are trained in system cloning, and don’t require an in-depth knowledge of any specific system to get it up and running again. TECHNOLOGY PLATFORMS

The Post ’45 Galleries operate on their own ethernet network, independent of the AWM’s IT network, except for some convenience links for system monitoring. Medialon is the control system brain that integrates the 35 individual AV components into one complete exhibit. Scattered throughout the gallery are an array of small AG Nueovo and mediumsized Panasonic LCD panels, each driven by its own standard PC with a Magenta Research balun system delivering DVI video via Cat 6 cable. Some displays have localised audio through highly focused Dakota Audio Hypersonic speakers. Pioneer V8000 DVD players are used throughout. They are a conservative choice, but with a common unit, spares are readily available for a swap out in under 15 minutes.

The exhibits use Panasonic PT-D4500 and PT-D5700 DLP projectors with projection configuration, alignment and blending provided by Dataton’s Watchout software mounted on the standard PCs with HD video delivery at 1920 x 1080 resolution. Control is via Medialon. The ‘fast and simple’ maintenance mantra is apparent in the lighting infrastructure as well. A theatrical style any-dimmer-toany-outlet load patch system uses LSC 72-way i-Patches and LSC i-Pro dimmers located behind foldout display walls. This configuration provides a high level of service accessibility and facilitates dimmer swapovers in just three minutes. Active exhibit lighting, including the moving heads and effects units in the Iroquois exhibit, is under the control of a Jands Vista console using its GUI and is synchronised to Medialon via SMPTE timecode. The major AV systems and visual content were designed by Mental Media’s Bruce Brown, with lighting design by Bluebottle. The project was delivered by Total Concept Projects under Joe Musico, with site management by Peter Guest. 

046

FEATURE

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manager A C31 LED When you’re staging a show C31C3for Stage -1.14 Sky control guard LED billions of viewers with dozens ofFollow SctlGuard -1.15 0.26 technical departments consisting0.25 of +7.07 C3 Follow spot -1.17 Stage manager B C31 Follow spot -2.04 hundredsFollow of crew, thousands of C31 front C3 Sky machiene guard -1.06 Follow Follow -1.26 of house staff, dozens of support SmacGuard 6.1 0.27a 0.33 -1.13 departments, 18,000 performers, and -1.19 -1.09 +7.36 46 security operation that includes liaising C3 Sky machiene guard -1.23 -1.21 -1.22 -1.20 -1.24 with the world’s largest standing army, Node 8SmacGuard the matter of coordination through Gate NW C3 Follow spot +7.19 communication becomes a major C3 Camera big screen Follow 47 Power plug: CamScr factor in16the success of the enterprise. A; 230 V; 2,0 KW 0.12 Staging the spectacular opening and 0.31 C3 Stage manager B closing ceremonies of the Olympic C3 Stage manager A SM C3 Sky control guard C3 Sky machiene guard and Paralympic 48 SM games in Beijing was SctlGuard SmacGuard 0.02 a matter 0.1 of immense national pride for C3 Light information +7.29 +7.18 C3 the Chinese people. So important was it C3 Stage manager A Lighting C3 Follow spot SM that they diverted the communications Follow 0.23 49 their moon landing C3 Sky machiene guard C3 Sky co 0.04 engineers 0.11 from 0.03 C3 Light Information SmacGuard SctlGuard project to specifyLighInfo in great detail, the +7.28 +7.17 communications system that would be +7.01 C3 LED 50This approach used for the ceremonies. LED Antenna position: was unlike many previous Olympic 0.19 1x SD RX ceremonies (such as Sydney and 1x SD TX 51 Athens) where overseas ‘ceremonies 1x SI RX 1x SI TX experts’ were brought in to supervise 1x BTR TX RCP 1028 Show caller 1 RCP 1028 Show caller 2 the inexperienced locals who were not DCP 1016 52 rehearsal rehearsal 1x BTR RX SC 2 SC 1 considered to be equal to the task. LD 3.02 3.03 1x FM Riedel Communications won the 53 3.01 tender for the system after convincing 54 the Chinese engineers that its distributed 55 56 1 matrix-based Artist system was at least 2 as capable as the traditional centralised C3* Booster Light Information C3* Booster Sky machiene C3* Booster Sky control guard left systems thatleftwere tendered by guard the left other LighInfo Sky machiene guard LighInfo To Antennas upper bidders. According to Marc Schneider, balcony +7.34 +7.30 +7.32 Riedel’s Rental Director for International C3 Follow spot C3* Booster Light Information C3* Booster Sky machiene C3* Booster Sky control Events, itFollow was right clear from the outset guard right guard rightthat C3 Light Informatio LighInfo Sky machiene guard LighInfo To floor 3 (control room) Riedel LighInfo 6.3was there simply as a skilled Power plug: 16 A; 230 V; 2,0 KW

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equipment and service provider to plan, 6.48 0.20 supply, install and operate the largest and most complex temporary intercom C3 Follow spot installation ever built. Rather than rely Follow on the availability of good technical translators for 6.14 day-to-day operational15 discussions, the Riedel team included six Chinese speakers, two of whom C3 Repeater Light information were factory engineers from Germany. Lighting Linked by dual redundant fibre 14 6.49 optic rings, the eight Artist frames were configured as a 700 x 700-point nonC3 Stage manager B blocking matrix, where no user panel SM C3 Repeater Spotlight was further than 50 metres from13 a frame. Follow 0.06 Together with uninterruptible power 6.50 C3 Follow spot supplies, the dual fibre ring system Follow ensured the system could continue to 0.14 12 C3 Light Information operate despite major infrastructure LighInfo failures. In reality, the system operated +7.05 for its entire six-month life with only a 11â&#x20AC;&#x201D; a card in an Artist single minor fault frame, which caused no disruption, as C3 Follow spot Follow the redundant spare card in the frame 10 seamlessly replaced it in the matrix. 6.13 The system comprised 80 Artist 9 control panels, 24 digital partyline interfaces driving 210 Performer C3 beltpacks, 44 RiFace wired to radio interfaces, 650 handheld radios, six FM radio transmitters and 18,000 FMR-1000 mass monitoring FM Power plu radio receivers worn by all performers. 16 A; 230 V Developed by Riedel for large-scale An extract from the full ceremonies C3 Follow spot events the FMR-1000 are capable Follow intercom plan showing the dual fibre receiving signals from outside of the optic rings that formed the system 6.12broadcast band to commercial FM backbone. Some layers have been allow the use of channels that are free omitted for clarity. 4.133

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Artist 128

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Artist 128

of any commercial users. The original specification called for only(!) 12,000 units to be shared between performers during the Wireless BP ceremony. However, in rehearsals it became clear that the logistical complexity of transferring 6000 receivers in twenty minutes during the ceremony would be a major problem, so with only three weeks to go before the opening ceremony, a further 6000 units were ordered and supplied. To deal with the classic problem of poor wireless reception in the concrete and steel structure of the Bird’s Nest stadium, many kilometres of ‘leaky coax’ were run throughout the stadium structure to provide full duplex coverage for all wireless devices Although this may have been the biggest temporary communications system ever installed, it was only a small part of Riedel’s total involvement Artist in 128 the Beijing Olympics. It also supplied communications to a large number of the television broadcasters covering the games and to all of the venues for the competition events. And while its Olympics system was in place in 128 Beijing it was also a major supplier to theArtist World Youth Day events here in Australia (see Wave If You Can Hear Me on page 50.) 

6.31

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6.30

6.26

6.25

6.24

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6.4

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6.2

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6.11

6.12

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6.14

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6.17

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4.128

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4.088

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Node 2 Control room A

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0.45

Pyro control room

4.119 4.074 4.073

Sports presentation room

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PA control room

4.143

4.126

4.138

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+8.5

0.00 +5.1

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4.102

4.024

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4.026

Left: comms control at the Bird's Nest stadium. Below: some of the 2008 drummers being given their FMR-1000 receivers (inset)

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050

FEATURE

Wave If You Can Hear Me The sheer scale of World Youth Day in Sydney presented some enormous logistical challenges. Text: / Tim Stackpool

Barrangaroo stage

Billed as the biggest event Sydney has seen since the Big Sports Carnival in Homebush (2000), World Youth Day (WYD) saw a staggering 223,000 registered Catholic pilgrims participate in any number of the week’s papal activities, making it the largest event ever hosted in Australia. But amid the celebrations and obvious front of house technology, a secure and robust talkback and communications system was devised to ensure that all production, venue management, event management and security personnel kept in touch and on cue. The Auditoria team behind this significant undertaking was led by Ian Anderson as the head systems designer, with support from Scott Willsallen, Nick Eltis, Jason Owen and Paul Walton. “We had only 20 weeks from initial concept to delivery,” reveals Anderson. “This is a very short time frame when you consider the need to allocate spectrum by

the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), obtain approvals for transmitter locations, and keep in front of requests from the organisers, such that equipment can be shipped from around the world.” Anderson is no stranger to the art of designing large-scale event communications systems. His experience already encompasses such demanding events as the 2006 Asian Games, 2006 Melbourne Commonwealth Games, Sydney 2000 Olympics, 2004 Athens Olympics, 2003 Rugby World Cup, and many Hillsong Church events. Beyond the actual implementation, determining the requirements was a challenge in itself, and Auditoria developed their own ‘reverse brief’ based on a description of the event furnished by the World Youth Day organisers. Anderson said, “key data such as venues, amount of people expected and preliminary production crew numbers were

useful pieces of information that helped us provide the reverse brief outlining the types of communication systems available, quantities available and our suggested approach to radio and wired systems.” Meetings were held with government agencies, broadcasters, World Youth Day internal departments and other stakeholders to finally pull together the system designs. In terms of wired and venue-based systems, an approach was determined where each major venue was treated as a separate selfcontained system. The major venues were Randwick Racecourse, Centennial Park, St Mary’s Cathedral, the Domain, the Sydney Opera House, Darling Harbour and Barrangaroo. During normal events these venues operated as independent systems with digital matrix intercom systems provided by Riedel. Between 12 and 40 digital key panels were installed at each site.

FEATURE

DIGITAL DEXTERITY

“The flexibility provided by digital matrix systems is vital in a situation where requirements are regularly changing. It’s equally important that changes are able to be made quickly without interrupting other users on the system,” Anderson said. “Four channel masters and classic partylinestyle systems have their place, but not in environments where cable runs may be hundreds of metres and there are more possibilities of interference from external sources.” According to Anderson, the matrix systems allow seamless integration of panels, four-wire systems from outside broadcast (OB) trucks, two-way radio interfaces, fullduplex radio systems and beltpack systems. The major reason Anderson selected Riedel was their configuration flexibility. “Many of these system frames can be linked to create

one complete non-blocking system,” he said. “Digital frames can be placed onstage, FOH, backstage, at event control or in an OB truck, and they will all talk to each other and act like a single frame. Riedel’s rental stock represents the largest pool of rental production communications equipment in the world, which means they can simultaneously supply systems for multiple world-class events, even events on the scale of the Beijing Olympics, Formula One racing, the Red Bull Air race and the Asian Games.” Given the scale of the system design, the radio networks used throughout the event were provided by several different companies — Motorola Australia, Vertel and The PA People all played a significant role in providing resources to the event. It was Auditoria’s job to ensure that the supply and approach was consistently maintained

051

within and between these organisations — the ability to communicate between the different supplier-provided networks was paramount. In this respect, the coordination was staggering. “Frequency allocation was probably the most important factor,” said Anderson. “With over 250 UHF mobile frequencies in use, on top of the already full and congested Sydney spectrum, this is not an easy task. ACMA looked at the locations and frequencies already in use, and then allocated the special out-of-band resources that were available.” CHANNELLING THE WIRELESS

As more than half of the two-way radios used onsite were rental units from Europe (with its different frequency allocations), some frequencies were subsequently seconded from other areas of the UHF band. Anderson

052

FEATURE

TAKE A NUMBER The WYD communications system employed a variety of different radio systems and networks. These included Motorola Rentals 800MHz Smartnet trunked system, Motorola Rentals Digital Zeon, and Vertels Communications MPT and LTR trunked systems. Local duplex and simplex systems were also used. Over 200 Riedel digital matrix keypanels, connected to 16 Riedel Artist systems. Sites such as Barrangaroo used five Artist frames all linked with fibre to route signals around that enormous site. Over 3000 portable radios were deployed. Thirty FM transmitters were used. Many radio channels were in use through the land mobile spectrum. Over 200 frequencies were allocated to be used by WYD, ranging between 403MHz and 512MHz. The city was covered by 800MHz analogue and digital trunking systems. This doesn’t include the pre-existing licences that were in use by the rental companies, broadcasters and any Sydney-based company involved in running the event. The NSW government radio network (GRN) was also in full use dealing with many government agencies.

053

FEATURE

Above: Comms rack at the St Marys site. Right: ISDN rack at the Convention & Exhibition Centre terminating link lines. Left: Control room for the Stations of the Cross.

pays tribute to Brendan Puckeridge, Mark Bidwell and the teams at ACMA in Sydney and Canberra. Countless hours were spent calculating what frequencies could be used in each location and whether intermodulation difficulties might be expected with existing users. “During the event there were two teams who would hunt down any problems that we, or other essential users on the ground, might be having. Not only were we running two-way radio equipment, but there was a host of other radio users including wi-fi systems, microwave links and a very substantial FM system,” he said. FM broadcast gear was deployed for simultaneous translation of seven major languages at all of the major sites. There was also one Sydney-wide transmission from the Optus building at North Sydney for English services. Transmission sites were located at the Domain, Barrangaroo and Darling Harbour to cover the city venues. Particularly noteworthy was the use of the same seven frequencies at each of the sites so the pilgrims could enjoy consistent reception. This necessitated extensive surveys to ensure that the antenna patterns did not overlap across the various sites. A separate transmitter array was located at the Randwick Racecourse site. Given all of these considerations, major emphasis was given to the interfacing of wired and wireless talkback systems. At Randwick, for example, a wired system of 40 panels was installed for a range of users, some of whom also required radio interfaces for communicating with audio FOH, site management and crowd management. A total of 24 duplex and eight simplex radio interfaces were connected into the wired system. Barrangaroo had a similar number, with the other major sites using between eight and twelve duplex

and four simplex interfaces. A significant performance during World Youth Day was the Stations of the Cross, undertaken at various locations across the city. The performance re-enacts the final hours before Christ’s crucifixion, and presented its own challenges, both for the TV coverage and for the comms. A central stage management position was set up in Hall 2 at the Sydney Convention & Exhibition Centre. TV coverage images from all the performance venues were made separately available for stage management and another central communications system was installed to facilitate talkback between all of the staging, technical and lighting crews. To achieve this, a total of 24 ISDN lines and codecs were deployed to dial into each site along the route. A citywide radio system based at Sydney Tower dealt with roving stage management and lighting crews. It not surprising to learn of one of the biggest single challenges of the project: “There was not enough physical matrix equipment in the country to do all of the venues,” reports Anderson. “Radio handheld numbers were also shy for the specific frequencies that we had to use. Obtaining comprehensive information from various stakeholders is always a challenge but this is usually because communications is one of the last things people think about. It really needs to be one of the first. We allocated one person entirely dedicated to hunting down information on handheld numbers required, as well as where and when they were going to be used. We also needed to ensure that the event’s utility suppliers, such as cleaning crews and security contractors, who use their own two-ways, did not inadvertently clash or cause interference across the spectrum.” 

Equipment List Riedel Communications: 160 x Artist keypanels 18 x Artist matrix frames 50 x ISDN Codecs 1800 x Radio handhelds 60 x Duplex radio interfaces 30 x Simplex radio interfaces 5 x Marine radios Fibre backbone for frame linking

PA People: 34 x broadcast FM transmitters inc filtering and combining. 300 x Radio Handhelds Video Surveillance Systems for Barangarroo and Randwick

Vertel: 160 x MTP portable radios LTR Trunking networks 100 x LTR portables

Motorola Australia: 450 x Digital Zeon portables 12 x Digital Zeon mobiles 500 x Smartnet portables 100 x Conventional portables

054

FEATURE

This Technology Sucks Dracula’s Beasts of Burlesque show is good old-fashioned cabaret spiced up with some cutting-edge AV. Text: / Guy Harrison

The Dracula’s hoopla kicks in early. Leather-clad wenches and fire-twirling gremlins greet guests outside, while a Frankenstein-inspired parking valet directs traffic. Once inside guests are crowded into a small foyer where the door is dramatically bolted. After a brief and hilarious introduction as to what awaits us on ‘the other side’ (a cocktail bar, as it happens) a simulated storm hits the room. House lights flicker; thunder rocks the house PA and LCD screens flicker and come to life. A foreboding figure encourages us to take a ride on the ghost train, if we dare! Meanwhile, a three-piece band of animatronic skeletons vamp away and an animatronic fortune-teller conveys more bad news. Paul Newman (Director and Technical Designer) explains later that a Guilderfluke Show Control system is driving everything in the cocktail bar. Founded by an ex-Disney engineer in the early ’80s, Guilderfluke & Co. Robotics & Sound Systems pioneered modular, off-the-shelf animation control systems and a few years later moved into digital audio repeater modules. The resulting combination can be configured to control anything from the simple to the most complex of shows and models. VISCERAL EXPERIENCE

Having survived the terrors of the ghost train we arrive in the theatre proper, which is superbly detailed with a vaudeville-like 1920s feel. The main theatre seats approximately 450 people for dining on two levels. But the stage is tiny. So small, in fact, I find myself shaking my head in bemusement, repeatedly

uttering the word how?. And after tracking down Technical Director John Taylor for a tour of backstage, it turned out to be just the right question. Here’s ‘how’: The main stage is 7.4m wide and 2.4m deep with a 2m revolve. Off the main stage runs a 2m catwalk with a 400mm revolve and motor-driven lift that elevates to 600mm. On either side of the main stage are two smaller triangular stages, and a stage above that flies in. There are flylines aplenty — 13 to service these stages. There is no backstage as it’s all hard up against the back wall of the venue. The two side stages are accessed through small rear doors. I have never seen a stage area so fully utilised. Against the back wall are flylines carrying painted backcloths and Dracula’s latest technical addition, the Vuepix RGB LED Curtain. Measuring 7.2m by 2.4m, the screen is full stage width and height, which was one of the criteria that had to be met. As John Taylor explains: “The owners have long been interested in the idea of a screen but until recently they’ve either not been big enough, too heavy, or far too expensive. Plus, we’ve never wanted to have a screen on chain motors. The show moves at a frantic pace and even a fast chain motor can only manage 8m per minute — we have a 2.5m move, so that’s about 18 seconds too long! We can drop the Vuepix RGB LED curtain in 2.5 seconds. That gives incredible impact. The audience is amazed when you close the curtain and re-open it an instant later to reveal a screen of this size. The screen weighs around 350kg so we had to upgrade our fly tower, but the whole thing sits on two flylines, which is

pretty impressive.” The Vuepix RGB LED Curtain is a modular system comprising 600mm by 600mm tiles at a pixel pitch of 25mm (24 x 24 pixels per tile), with the LEDs positioned on a lattice framework. Some may consider the resolution too restrictive. John Taylor explains: “The resolution of the screen is 288 by 96 pixels, but we never had any delusions of running hi-res video. The screen is used more as an effect. That said, we run a helicopter night shot of a cityscape and that’s very effective. What’s important is good video production. We edit our video in Apple’s Final Cut Pro and rather than scale it down to size, we crop the image to avoid any scaling artifacts. It’s made easier by the fact that at our resolution it’s often not the centre of the video we’re looking to use.” TECHNICAL KICKS

Lighting fixtures abound: 4 x Martin Color Pro 400, 2 x Martin RoboScan Pro 518, 5 x Robe ColorSpot 160XT, 2 x Robe ColorSpot 250AT, 3 x Robe ColorMix 250AT and 1 x High End Systems Technobeam with 48 channels of Jands dimmers. A snoop around the bio box sees Macintosh computers ruling the roost. A 20-inch iMac runs MA Lighting’s OnPC lighting control software with a twoport output node. An ELC Sidekick is used for some lighting presets. Unconventionally, the Technobeam is employed for followspot duties, controlled by two Griffin Powermate USB wheels for pan and tilt — ingenious. Audio mixing is taken care of by a Yamaha DM1000 console with QLab master show control running on a Mac

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;The audience is amazed when you close the curtain and re-open it an instant later to reveal a screen of this size.â&#x20AC;?

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They may have a bold new screen but the Dracula’s bio box (control point) looks just like tech areas have always looked — albeit with a couple of extra screens!

Pro 8-core. Designed for the creation of multimedia timelines in theatre, dance, etc, QLab is available as freeware. Although, in this form, it’s only possible to add audio cues to the timeline you can expand functionality through licensed plug-ins. “QLab is the heartbeat of our production,” noted John Taylor. “Using MIDI note on/offs and MIDI Show Control messages, it controls the DM1000 for scene recall and channel mutes, MA’s OnPC for lighting cues, the Line6 POD for guitar patches, Alesis DM5 for drum trigger patches as well as firing our confetti cannons and doing projector blanking and AV switching. All this, while playing back DV files to our Vuepix screen. QLab allows you to map video playback to any pixel on the Apple desktop, so we just connect the Vuepix LED curtain to a video card output and that’s it. It’s very simple. Sure, it’s a lot to have in one file but it allows our operators to concentrate on the audio mix. The added bonus of running everything on Macs is that I can grab my Macbook laptop, sit in any seat in the theatre and using Apple’s Remote Desktop Software I can wirelessly control the whole show: MA’s OnPC for any lighting touch-ups, QLab for cue changes or the DM1000 through Yamaha’s Studio Manager Software for audio adjustments… all from

the one desktop!” Two Mac Pro 8-core towers run multiple video outs to all the screens and projectors in the building. The band uses wireless in-ear monitoring with 13 channels of wireless inputs for an assortment of bass and guitar bugs, custom Sennheiser ME105 headsets and SM58 handhelds. Apogee Sound front of house speakers combine with JBL subs powered by Crown MA and Electrovoice CP Series amps. All this kit is housed in a 2m by 2m open-fronted bio box. It’s an impressive sight. Equally impressive is the fact that one person operates the entire show. John Taylor: “In the old days we used to have more crew, but now it just couldn’t be done. There is so much going on it would be too intense to drive manually!” SHOWTIME

Dracula’s Beasts of Burlesque show is a fouract affair. Two pre-shows and a main act with an interval. The night spans the full gamut of musical-comedy, circus comedy, magicalcomedy, comedy-comedy and puppetry, as well as some serious rock and pop accompanied by some great choreography. The show is a laugh-a-minute: raunchy, comic satire with a carnival feel. While there

is a lot of technology at work, you never feel as though it’s stealing the show. A credit to the show’s designers. That said, there is certainly some wow factor when the Vuepix LED curtain sparks up. In keeping with the rest of the show it’s introduced gently and works itself into a pulsating dayglo frenzy at the shows conclusion. Dracula’s is currently undergoing a renovation that will see the roof raised and a new lighting system installed with 70 RGB LED house lights that can be individually controlled. I asked Paul Newman if the renovation was to increase capacity. “No, it’s actually to create more room between tables,” he replied. “It allows us to raise our lighting bars so the overall look from the mezzanine level is much cleaner. The RGB houselights will allow us to give the whole room an ambience based on what’s happening on stage. It’s all about improving the experience for the audience.” So that’s about it folks: a hi-tech venue employed to stage good ol’ cabaret. But it’s great to see such commitment to maintaining a fresh look via the harnessing of cuttingedge technology. It’s little wonder Dracula’s has been able to fly the ‘theatre restaurant’ flag for 25 years… and counting (hah... ah, ah ahhhh). 

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Amway Calling The Amway China juggernaut rolled into Melbourne. Staging Connections put its best screen forward. Text: / Brad Watts

Earlier this year, Staging Connections had to think big. Not as though it’s unaccustomed to large productions, but when Staging Connections created Australia’s largest flat projection screen for a series of massive Amway China business sessions in Melbourne, it really had to pull out all stops to keep the series of shows on track. The 46m-long, 6m-high screen was the visual highlight of the gigantic set, delivered by Staging Connections to meet the client’s exacting requirements. The venue was the Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre, with a jamboree that included around 7000 Amway delegates spread across four separate events. Staging Connections had worked with Amway on three incentive events in the past, but this show proved to be the biggest and most demanding production to date. FROM CHINA WITH LOVE

Amway China gave Staging Connections a very precise brief, with Staging Connections providing all AV, set construction and theatre infrastructure to deliver the required pizzaz. The technical brief involved the immense screen, full control equipment, projection and control towers, along with a high quality audio system and

static, room and intelligent lighting. Various sections of the show required bespoke constructions, such as a custommade stage, a custom lectern and a backlit front logo panel, as well as stairs to and fro the various levels of staging. On stage, massive letters backlit with special LED strips spelt out the word ‘Melbourne’ – in both English and Mandarin. With an eight-day bump-in, a crew of over 50 technicians and staff to set up and pack down the event, a technical operation crew of 15 local and Chinese technicians to oversee the sessions, you get some idea of the enormity of the task – building the largest projection screen in Australia was no mean feat. AV spoke to Staging Connections Technical Director Andrew Maccoll about some of the whys and wherefores behind pulling off such a spectacular.

RIGOUROUS AV: So what did this massive video rig consist of Andrew? Andrew Maccoll: Video-wise there were six Christie 20k Roadsters which were backed up with a further six Barco R12s. The projectors each run with control software via dedicated PCs so we could power them up and down using a combined wireless and wired backbone network. There were seven Folsom Encore Presentation Systems, then within the Encore rig there’s a 16 x 16 analogue matrix switcher and an 8 x 8 DVI switcher, and an 8 x8 HDSDI matrix switcher – then there’s the Encore controller. We also run an uninterruptible power supply over the Encore system just to make sure nothing goes down during the show. Then there’s 14 Dataton Watchout PCs. That consists of two complete Dataton systems, seven of

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which are required to do the main work, with the other seven on standby should the main system go down. Then there’s a Sony DFS-800 for vision mixing and a full broadcast camera string of three cameras hanging off the end of that. Replay was via GrassValley Turbo hard drives, again two of those were dedicated to backup duties. There were some presenters that used Powerpoint for their slide presentations, so we had four dedicated graphics PCs for presenters’ slideshows. Those presentations were executed via the Encore system. Again, all that gear was all powered via UPSs in case of power failures. Plus, with such a long startup time for all those PCs, basically too slow to recover from a power failure, there was no option but to keep everything powered redundantly. AV: The Dataton Watchout systems took

care of the blending of the projections? AM: Well actually we’ve found we get better results from the Encore system. The Watchout systems will do a blend but we find it easier not to rely on that because we’re running so much additional content. We’ve got video running from hard drives and IMAG, and that footage has to run across the blend as well. So the Watchout is running ‘background plates’ if you will. All the large graphics and all the ‘walk-in/ walk-out’ videos that are playing during the opening and closing of the show. Then when there’s a window of, say, somebody speaking or a set of Powerpoint slides, those images are being dropped in downstream by Encore – so that’s managing all the blending duties. We were pretty much at the limits of what we could achieve with Watchout. With trying to synchronise six hard drives

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and six video cards with Watchout you’ve got to have the host machines very highly spec’ed with RAM and video capabilities, so it become a tough ask. Plus, running at higher resolutions will actually fracture the image and you’ll see it all start to come apart when you least expect it. AV: It’s a huge rig… AM: It certainly is. It’s a lot of gear, and this is the area where we always find ourselves having to balance things up. Whether or not we can do without certain bits of gear. I’m a big fan of keeping these things as simple as possible as it usually works better, but in this case the scale of the show required a huge assembly of equipment. AV: Was this the largest screen Staging Connections has put together? AM: Well we regularly do 18m by 16m screens with a three projector blend – that setup is a very standard corporate show that we’ve installed for countless venues around the country. We’ve done work using cycloramas up to 25-odd metres wide, but nothing quite this big. We’ve also done very large projection blends. For example, we did a tourism event in Adelaide where we used seven projectors blended together, but that was primarily for scenic backgrounds, what we refer to as ‘wallpaper’ – montages of imagery

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TRIM & TERRIFIC AV: Audio must have been difficult with such a large expanse between speaker arrays. What system did you use? AM: We used EAW and there were plenty of difficulties faced by the audio crew. For starters the trim height had to be quite high because the projection beam has to reach both the top and bottom of the screen. Normally when you hang a line array you’re not that concerned about projector beam widths and you can have your cabinets hanging quite low into the room. The brief for the audio crew was firstly to avoid interrupting any sight lines between the audience and the screen, but also to not impede the projection beams. Complying with those restrictions can be difficult but the crew managed it in style. In terms of gear they used 18 EAW KF730 SLAM (Small Line Array Module) units for the array modules, then six EAW SB218s sub on the floor. So the system sound and dispersion was actually very good. The modules were flown above the screen but tipped down quite low. For the tiered seating sections of the audience this worked very well but one issue that did crop up was in the very front rows where the VIPs were seated. Because those patrons were out of the line array beam there’s a number of speaker cabinets built into the underside of the stage specifically for addressing those front rows.

basically. However, in those situations the screen surface isn’t as critical, nor is having such absolute image reproduction. The Amway shows are certainly the biggest screen fixture we’ve done to date. SCREENING PROCESS AV: Can you fill us in on some of the logistics involved with the actual screen surface? AM: Well the surface is a purpose designed fabric made by Screen Technics in Australia. They’ve goT the facilities to manufacture a surface of this size – it’s a plastic-style material that’s welded with invisible joins. What you end up with is an enormous plastic sheet with eyelets around the edges. The eyelets are used to mount the screen and pull the screen tight against the frame. The frame was constructed from 300mm box-truss supplied by Bytecraft Entertainment. Then our guys cable-tie the surface to the frame. So everything is put together flat on the ground, we then do the top and the sides, then raise the screen into a vertical position because the surface then has to stretch out for a few days. We then pull it up vertically, to just above working

height, cable tie the bottom and let it sit for another day while it stretches out some more, after which we re-tension the whole thing again. Once we’re happy, the screen is then flown out to the trim height and left to hang for another couple of days while we fine tune it. Obviously you can’t have any creases, so the span-sets when flying it have to be done in such a way that it doesn’t cause any further warping and create more wrinkles. It’s so finicky that even where you have the trussing joining together, those joins can end up standing out slightly, so it becomes a bit of a juggling act. AV: Image stabilisation is always an issue. Were there additional headaches involved with a projection screen of this size? AM: Well, yes, this is always the big issue with large projection shows, especially when you’re blending images. Even a slight movement in the concrete slab can affect the positioning of a projector. In some venues large movements of people, or even a forklift working in an adjoining area can affect the projector positioning, and consequently the resulting image. Plus

there’s the movement within the scaffold tower which can compound those changes again. The answer to all this is: constantly check and readjust the rig. Our crews would check the lineup in the morning then recheck every lunch hour. To keep the standards that we’re looking for, the video crew would conduct their adjustments using a pair of binoculars. They’d check the focus and check the lineup of the blend sections. The Christie projectors were approximately 32 metres back from the screen, so there’s a plenty of margin for error even after you’ve compensated for any movement. AV: Can the surface material be reused? AM: We can reuse it, and yes we still have the surface, so that can be redeployed when required, but obviously only for an engagement that needs a screen of that size. We’ve had a couple of inquires already but it’s a big job – the screen material alone travels between venues on its own pallet and weighs about 160kg. It’s like dealing with a 160kg, brilliant-white pool liner. 

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FEATURE

High-Wire Educators AV tracks the rapid changes in the education sector.

Then buggers off to the student union bar.

Text: / Jonathan Ciddor

Interactive biological teaching lab at Monash University

The last decade or so has seen tertiary institutions around the country employing highly-skilled audiovisual systems managers to draw together a seemingly endless array of audiovisual paraphernalia into coherent, integrated, future-oriented and user-focused solutions for the teaching spaces. While they are busy playing this game of three-dimensional chess, maintaining their installations and training educators not to break them, they are burning the midnight oil doing what they love to do: designing new systems and upgrades, and then making them happen. Their huge challenge is to ride the bucking bronco that is the bleeding edge of AV technology, work out what is on offer and if it has real value; how it uses IT platforms; and then to run a book on which technology will be adopted and why. What could be simpler? Every tertiary institution is an autonomous body, and each has its own approach to managing AV. Most AV departments (known by an amazing variety of names), have arrived at their present position as a result of the history of the campus and its management regimes, and the outcome of the odd turf war or two between administrative divisions. AV VS IT

Although faculties, schools, divisions and departments get merged or renamed with monotonous regularity, it’s interesting to note that AV frequently remains an independent unit, even if nominally placed

in an IT department. It is usually explained away with, “Oh they just don’t understand AV” or “The IT guys aren’t interested in getting up a ladder to fix a projector or change a lamp”. However, ask the AV managers and staff about IT issues and they know them all, and then some. The reason is fairly straight forward: For many years they sat in project meetings and were told “You can’t do that”, “That won’t work” “You are not putting that on our network.” So they have built their own networks, solved their own problems and only involved IT staff when required. As a result the accumulated knowledge, while with a different focus, has delivered some fantastic solutions for teaching and training. This is the real strength of these AV departments as they have pioneered a way through the minefield of using IT platforms in everyday solutions. The University of Canberra were one of the first to develop the technology to stream lectures out of the classrooms and into the ether for consumption by the sick, the sleepy and the overcommitted. The University of Western Australia has taken this platform a step further and commercialised iLecture to address this market. As described in detail in AV Issue 1, the University of Technology, Sydney, manages 250 rooms over three campuses, spread across 15 kilometres of inner and suburban Sydney, and, with the help of RoomView software from Crestron, can

view the status of all of their rooms on a single monitor. They can provide online support through the same screen as well as knowing if the projectors are turned on and how many hours before a lamp change is due. HETEROGENEOUS NETWORKING

At the University of Newcastle, they are trialling this a step further, by using RoomView to monitor installations controlled by a range of control platforms from a variety of manufacturers’ systems including their installations of AMX’s Pro 3 and Netlinx control systems. These guys don’t take no for an answer. They are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. They also support video conferencing on their suburban Newcastle and inner-city campuses, along with those at Ourimbah (Central Coast) and the regional campuses of Orange, Tamworth, Port Macquarie and Taree, as well as the University Department of Regional Health and the Centre for Rural & Remote Mental Health. As a result of these challenges and the rapid growth of the technologies, the process of managing the development of their systems has also changed. A decade ago it was common practice for tertiary institutions to outsource their systems design to independent consulting engineers and AV system designers. It allowed them to remain at arm’s length from the manufacturers and ensure the robustness of the tender process. Projects were generally delivered on a turnkey basis.

The shortcomings of this process became very clear when it got very difficult to get contractors back on site within the constraints of the institutions’ operational timetable. There was little continuity of service and support staff. Institutions also found it difficult to change from their existing control platform, often chosen by a previous supplier. Most importantly, there were significant battles over the intellectual property of the programming code. Let me elaborate: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY OWNERSHIP

Contractors would design the program code to deliver the functionality required by the specification and would install it into the controllers. The systems worked, the project was signed off, the contractors were paid, the warranty period was met, and everyone was happy. But when the institution wanted to make some changes, they had no choice but to involve the original contractor, as the institution was locked out of code owned by the contractor. There were myriad problems over who owned what rights over the code. Today’s AV departments are small, diverse, vibrant, customer-focused units. There are teams delivering rapid and precise support to academic staff to ensure that lectures and presentations keep running, as there just isn’t the time or the venues to relocate a lecture theatre full of students if an AV system fails. With teaching spaces commonly operating from 9.00am to 9.00pm, and regularly providing industry training and community access at weekends, frequent rescheduling is not an option.

STAYING ON SITE

Other teams work night shifts and weekends to get into the rooms and provide the maintenance that keeps these systems in good condition. Then there are the teams designing and testing new solutions and upgrades, planning the project implementation, and preparing the schedules for the institution’s central purchasing. Within these teams are the system programmers and installers who build and fitoff the racks of equipment and commission the systems. What can be better than having the engineer or technician who built the system onsite and available to support it. It’s a lot faster and the in-house accumulation of knowledge is invaluable. It is easier to push the boundaries from a known base. Each summer, as the academic year slows, it is common to hear that an AV department has to deliver 40 to 50 upgrades and new installations. But their windows of opportunity are always shrinking with more summer schools and short-course programs. After recent visits to two city and three regional campuses, it is enlightening to see how each faces their challenges. It’s reassuring to see ridgy-didge Aussie resourcefulness hasn’t been lost in this hi-tech, rapidly moving industry. Though the tools have changed from a pair of pliers, a piece of fencing wire, some rusty nails, a jam tin and a ute, to a delicate pair of wire cutters, a punch down tool, some black boxes, blue string and a fast network, these guys can create a solution for almost anything AV. 

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FEATURE

Interactive Projection Why just look when you can ‘touch’? Text: / Tim Stackpool

If you haven’t already seen it, you have no doubt heard about it. Interactive projection technology is still awaiting a savvy name [iProTech? — Ed™.], but current deployments are far reaching, from retailers all the way through to museums, where invisible technology reacts to the environment around it. Commercial developers of the technology such as Eyeclick, Impressx and ADVIS (marketed as Luminvision in the UK) are well entrenched in overseas markets, while local installer InMotionMedia boasts more than 50 installations in Australia — some permanent, some for special events. In basic terms, interactive projection is digital signage that transforms depending on how a person touches, kicks or moves in the vicinity of the signage. And, of course, all this is without the need for buttons, mouses or pressure-sensitive surfaces. The buzz phrase is ‘motion sensitive signage’. Most installations consist of some type of image projection, which typically can be onto walls, floors or glass. For example, in a thoroughfare where the image of a fish tank is projected onto the floor, people walking across it produce waves and ripples in the virtual tank. More simply, the technology can be used to create interactive touch ‘screens’, without the actual need for a screen. The motion sensitivity is achieved by a video camera working in tandem with the projected content, feeding back the live image data to a controlling processor. InMotionMedia’s Managing Director Yair Aviad exclusively uses the Eyeclick software in Australia and believes it has clear advantages over other technology. “The detection and response of the system is very natural and very reliable to run on a daily basis,” he said. “We have units running in Australia that have been performing for a year, seven days a week completely automatically with virtually no maintenance.”

EYECLICK — HOW IT WORKS

Each Eyeclick system fundamentally comprises a neatly suspended high-grade multimedia commercial projector, a highend media computer and a CCD infra-red sensitive camera with an adjacent infra-red emitter. The system detects movement via the CCD camera highlighted by the infra-red emitter. These movements are interpreted as a computer mouse movement and the system responds by making changes to the projected image as it falls on the floor, wall or glass window. Additionally, the movement detection and subsequent reaction within the projected image is multipoint sensitive, meaning the system will react irrespective of from where on the target it receives the stimulus, or how many different areas are stimulated simultaneously. According to Aviad, each client has different production requirements and he prefers a pre-installation period of about three to four weeks for development. Many people are involved in the production including Flash designers, creative agencies and animators. Clients are spread across special event producers, advertising agencies and direct corporate clients. Although the hardware requirements behind the magic are minimal, some installations have been particularly challenging. “We did an outdoor installation where the projector was elevated eight metres above the floor. However, our setup had to take place during daylight hours, with the projected image falling on a surface in direct sunlight — very difficult to see the image. But after sunset, the system worked perfectly,” said Aviad. InMotionMedia’s service includes standard built-in effects that can be combined to create a unique experience, or customised effects incorporating company logos and video can be designed locally. “For retail and window-type displays, you can

display regular computer software,” said Avaid. “This allows the customer to select the interactive components of an application by using their hand or a finger as a mouse movement.” InMotionMedia’s installations include dancefloors, conventions and exhibitions, and shopping centres. Given that versatility, there are three basic configurations within the Eyeclick system. Eyestep combines the human body motion as described with standard surfaces such as plain walls, tables, windows and floors. EyeTouch however, is customised for use on vertical glass surfaces, where the user can interact with traditional looking digital signage. Instead of a traditional monitor, the EyeTouch system merely requires a rear projection film applied to the inner side of a window as well as the regular camera sensor array. Another version, EyeBoard, is designed for tabletop applications. Using an internal projector placed underneath the table pointing upwards towards the table’s translucent surface, it detects users touching the display as well as objects placed on the table such as mugs, plates or hands. Architecture and building firms for example, could use this system to build 3D renders of building designs with their clients. Retail customers could mix and match fashion items. Finally, EyeControl allows all publicly deployed systems to be controlled from a single workstation anywhere in the world. It also reports statistical information and feedback regarding the effectiveness and type of user interaction. For implementation in a short timeframe, Eyeclick can supply an array of templates for virtually any application. Holiday, Christmas, Sports, Shopping are all covered. Most ‘experiences’ are presented within a foreground/background configuration, with the foreground element representing the most interactive dynamics. The reactive foreground template elements include such things as soccer balls, roses,

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1./ A woman removes fake condensation from a virtual fresco, depicting a woman in the thermal baths of ancient Herculaneum, at the Virtual Archeologic Museum (MAV) in Ercolano near Naples. The MAV is a new, virtual interactive museum in front of the ruins of Herculaneum, a small city destroyed with Pompeii by the eruption of the Vesuvius volcano in 79AD. (Photo: Mario Laporto/AFP/Getty Images) 2./ Kids play virtual floor soccer using Lumivisionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s technology. 3./ Projector, IR illuminator and camera - a typical interactive projection installation. 4./ InMotionMediaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Eyeclick attracts the attention of airport shoppers 4.

computer keyboards and corporate logos can also be imported. Backgrounds are generally made up of client messages revealed by the interactive dispersion of the foreground. In this way, most client requests can be quickly incorporated. Internationally, one astoundingly superb example of interactive projections is deployed at Herculaneum’s Virtual Museum of Archaeology (MAV) in Italy. HERCULANEUM TASK

The town of Herculaneum was destroyed in 79 AD when the eruption of Mount Vesuvius encased it in scalding ash, killing those trying to flee, and preserving under 25 metres of debris some of the finest examples of private Roman villas, now excavated. The MAV, however, contains no actual relics of the natural disaster. Instead, it uses interactive projection technology to take the visitor on their own voyage of discovery. For example, waving your hand across a large projected ‘window’ removes the condensation to reveal typical reconstructed 1st-century Roman baths. Walking along a ‘dust’ covered pathway scatters the virtual debris to reveal intricate projected ceramic mosaics. Authorities hope the damage caused by tourists trampling through the actual ruins can be minimised by re-focusing attention to the techno-savvy MAV. The museum has no security guards, no ‘Do Not Touch’ signs. Further enhancements to the experience are achieved by RFiD tags presented to visitors on arrival, distinguishing between adults and kids. The exhibits respond accordingly.

“This is the aim of the technology. You get its presence but you don’t see it. Technology has to prompt curiosity, but remain discrete” Beyond the sheer brilliance of the installation, the museum was wary of mistakenly making the projection technology the centrepiece. Gaetano Capasso, concept developer for MAV, told the BBC, “the big difference with our museum is that the technology is transparent and invisible. This is the aim of the technology. You get its presence but you don’t see it. Technology has to prompt curiosity, but remain discrete.” And it’s this same philosophy that drives advertisers and event producers to the medium with little reservation. There’s no point in the public ‘playing’ with the technology if the message is lost in the process. It’s easy to detect a trend in the public use OF projection in this country: the focus of attention is on the image, rather than on the projector itself. Images projected onto the floor, for example, command the attention of ‘participants’ who are continuously looking downwards at the image, rather then skywards, towards the source of the technology. This focuses attention on the branding message, rather than elsewhere, such as on billboards or pillar posters. Future enhancements to the technology include the introduction of non-traditional mediums such as smoke, to be used as a projection surface. This ultimately gives the participant the ability to rotate 3D type holograms in free space. 

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TUTORIAL

Where Less is More Mix Minus, Clean Feed, Return Audio… call it what you will, but a successful conference call can be doomed without it. Text: / Gep Blake

A second feels like an hour. Sweat drips from your palms into the console as the entire board of executives sits patiently in the boardroom of Particularly Important Inc, looking up at the video conference screen: waiting for their esteemed colleague in Beijing to respond to the critical question put to her by the company president. You’ve checked everything before the meeting. You’ve heard the operator at the other end recite “Mary had a little lamb” in Mandarin. PA and mics all working at your end. Levels are good. Should be okay…. She smiles, nods, opens her mouth, gets about one and a half words out and starts to speak in slow motion, all the while gesticulating madly at her ear saying “sorry, I – seem – to – be – hearing – myself – back – a – bit – delayed…” Hearing your remote guests is only half the story. They need to hear you without extraneous distracting sound. That’s where a mix minus comes in. Mix minus audio, as the name suggests, is an audio feed that consists of a full mix of all program sound minus some elements – usually the source to which it is being fed. For example, if the mix minus had been set up properly for our friend in Beijing, she would hear everything in the conference room – attendees’ microphones, tape replays, etc, but not herself.

particular terms often become part of the local parlance within a given organisation or region. Mix minus is the term I have heard most commonly used in Australia, but broadcast professionals will generally understand what you’re talking about if you refer to clean feed audio or return audio. Because as operators we’re always in a desperate hurry, the word ‘audio’ will often get dropped to save us thirty milliseconds, but to avoid confusion, get in the habit of specifying whether you’re talking about audio or vision. To nail down the distinction, IFB is foldback that is provided to remote reporters; studio presenters; commentators or even operators. The audio in an IFB will usually be a mix minus, via an earpiece and the clever part is that it can be ‘interrupted’ by a director, producer or anyone appropriate, keying on a talkback panel. The purpose of IFB is to give directions or updated information to the person receiving it, with minimal intrusion on the performance. There is an obvious danger of distracting the on-air talent, so if you are ever using IFB, keep in mind the bod at the other end is already splitting their attention and trying to appear authoritative/compassionate/fun/ knowledgeable (depending on the situation), so interrupt sparingly!

KEEP IT CLEAN

THE SETUP

A mix minus is also referred to as return audio or a clean feed. This shouldn’t be confused with Interruptible Fold Back (IFB). In my experience, there’s no hard and fast rule about which term to use —

The ease of arranging a mix minus is dependent on how comprehensive your audio setup is. Some broadcast consoles have a dedicated clean feed output bus, which obviously makes things very straight

forward. Generally, however, the easiest way is to use an available group output. Simply select each source that you want on the group output that you’ve chosen, leaving out (minus-ing) the remote guest to whom the mix minus is being sent. If you’re using less sophisticated gear, you could use auxiliary or effects sends, but that will take a lot more setting up and starts to get pretty confusing, particularly if you have more than one remote guest. Generally it’s best to go post fader, as the guest will usually only be interested in hearing the main program sound and you reduce the danger of them hearing tapes cueing or other spurious material. In situations where a full two-way audio path isn’t available, the most common way for the audio to get back to the remote guest is via a Telephone Recorder Interface (TRI). This device will send your mix minus audio down a phone line to the remote location, where another TRI will decode the phone signal for use as normal audio. DON’T DELAY

The main problems are nothing new to AV operators – unwanted delay and feedback. Any transmission medium will introduce some delay, and that will obviously vary considerably according to the length and latency of the signal path. If the audio of the guest in Beijing strays into an open microphone in your boardroom, that sound will then be sent down the mix minus, with the delay from the original signal (Beijing to boardroom) plus the delay from the return path (boardroom to Beijing). Suddenly our colleague is hearing herself in her ear, half a

TUTORIAL

069

FEATURE

Multiple small low-level speakers and switched directional microphones minimise feedback and echo problems.

second after she speaks. Most disconcerting! Worse still, if the audio then leaks back to the main signal in Beijing, we have a feedback loop of global proportions. LOW LEVEL

INPUTS LOCAL MIC 1

There’s only one failsafe solution, and that’s to use earpieces at both ends to isolate all the audio. This is usually what happens in broadcast situations, and if it can be done this way, do it! However, it can be difficult or impossible to give earpieces to a large group – a big board of directors or an audience, for example. If you have to use sound reinforcement there are a few things you can do. Firstly, make sure the audio of the guest is as low as it can be; if possible use many smaller speakers at low level, closer to the listeners rather than big cabinets. Secondly, ride the levels as much as possible. Using our example again, if the boardroom mics are down when our guest is speaking, they’re less likely to pick up her audio, and vice versa. Finally, if these options just aren’t open to you and you’re prepared to lose a bit of sound quality, there’s the technological solution: echo cancelling. So, to sign off, there is no one-size-fitsall solution, but the important principles to keep in mind with a mix minus are: • Remote locations receive all program audio except themselves. • Isolate program and return audio signals – if possible through the use of earpieces, or at least through minimal PA and riding levels. 

LOCAL MIC 2 LOCAL MIC 3

AUDIO REPLAY AV REPLAY

REMOTE FEED FROM PILBARA REMOTE FEED FROM BEIJING

OUTPUT GROUPS FEED TO LOCAL SPEAKERS / PA REMOVED / LOW LEVEL REMOVED / LOW LEVEL REMOVED / LOW LEVEL NORMAL NORMAL

IC 1 AL M LOC MIC 1 AL LOC MIC 1 AL AY C O L L REP Y IO AUD REPLA NORMAL V A A ARR PILB ING NORMAL IJ BE

FEED TO LOCAL IN-EAR MONITORS NORMAL NORMAL NORMAL NORMAL NORMAL

FEED TO PILBARA NORMAL NORMAL NORMAL NORMAL NORMAL

FEED TO BEIJING NORMAL NORMAL NORMAL NORMAL NORMAL

NORMAL NORMAL

REMOVED NORMAL

NORMAL REMOVED

Signal paths for mix minus routing.

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TUTORIAL

Acoustic Absorption A basic understanding of why and how sound gets absorbed and a few practical hints go a long way. Text: / Andrew Steel

We’ve all heard stories and jokes about egg cartons on the walls of recording studios and they’re told as ‘back in the day’ tales, as if no such hair-brained silliness would happen today. The fact is, though, that a large number of materials are wrongly applied in an attempt to solve acoustical problems, and a lot of money is wasted and problems not solved. For some unknown reason, acoustics is one of those things that people seem happy to tackle with intuition, when in fact it is a complex branch of physics that even experienced professionals still have to work hard at to get right. What seems like a good idea is very often not. In this article I won’t try to make acoustics experts out of anyone, but we will cover enough of the basics to make it possible for good decisions to be made when solving acoustics problems. Before we try to understand what is and isn’t good to put on the walls [step away from from those egg cartons, and back away slowly — Ed.], we should have some idea of why we are putting anything there at all. All sorts of acoustic effects happen when sound meets walls, floors, ceilings and other surfaces in its path. Things like flutter, slap, echoes and comb filtering. When we put something on the walls, the acoustic characteristics of the room, like reverberation time and speech intelligibility, are altered for better or worse. Most often, such efforts in boardrooms, auditoria, theatres etc, make the sound worse rather than better. The question is then, how do we minimise or remove these unwanted effects?

used in an overall sense when the term Noise Reduction Coefficient (NRC) is used. NRC is the average of ‘absorption coefficient over frequency’. The chart below (Fig. 1) shows a typical example of how the coefficient of a material varies with frequency. One thing to be aware of here is that air itself also absorbs sound, and just as in the above example, absorbs more sound at higher frequencies (although the amount it absorbs is much less than in the example). In fact, most of the materials we commonly deal with absorb more at higher frequencies. This is due to the nature of the absorption mechanism and it is what causes many of the problems. In a room with carpet, curtains, soft furnishings and a few people, the high frequencies get absorbed quite dramatically while low and mid frequencies are left to reverberate to their hearts’ content. This is why rooms commonly get that boomy or chesty sound to them and people feel uncomfortable talking in them. AIR APPARENT

So let’s look at how sound travels through air. Sound waves are a series of elastic collisions between air molecules. In the same way as billiard balls bounce off of each other and Commercial Designer Panel Sound Absorption Coefficients 125

250

500

1000

2000

4000

NRC

0.3

0.7

0.93

FREE FIELD

Let’s start with an easy example: outdoors. In this case, there are no reflections to cause a problem. This is more than just a nice place to start explaining but actually how the acoustic absorption coefficient α is defined – an absorption coefficient of 1.0 is the same as an open window, i.e. sound hitting it does not reflect back at all. This means that nothing can have an α of more than 1 and how much materials absorb is between 0 and 1. Absorption coefficient is

transfer energy as they go, air molecules are caused to bounce each other along en masse, when a source such as a speaker excites them. The speaker moves in and out causing the nearest molecules to be pushed away and then sucked backwards. These in turn hit the next nearest molecules and ‘bounce’ them on. It is interesting to note that generally the molecules themselves do not travel across the room but rather bounce back and forth in their own local region. Have a look at Fig. 2 below, which shows a couple of very important concepts. The first thing to notice is how the resulting graph of pressure relative to distance is a sine wave. All sound is composed of such sine waves in different combinations. For our purposes it is sufficient to remember what a sine wave looks like — the one above is for one single frequency. The other thing to remember is that where the molecules are bunched together, the pressure is high and the velocity (speed) is low, and where they are sparse, the pressure is low but the velocity is high (pressure and velocity are 90 degrees out of phase with each other). It is a bit like putting your finger over the end of a hose — when it blocks the hose the pressure is high and velocity is zero, then when the finger is removed, the velocity is high and the pressure (on your finger) is zero. Fig. 1. (Left) The graph and table shows how a material's sound absorption coefficients change with frequency, resulting in an average Noise Reduction Coefficient (NRC). Fig. 2. (below) A sound wave: where the molecules are bunched together the pressure is high and the velocity low, and vice versa.

Fonic Acoustics Designer Panel — NRC Fonic Acoustics Designer Panel —0.93 NRC 0.93 Absorption Coefficient 1.2

Pressure up Pressure down

1 0.8

Atmospheric pressure

0.6 0.4 0.2 0

Fig. 1.

Motion of air molecules 125

250

500 Frequency

1000

2000

Fig. 2.

Propagation of sound

071

TUTORIAL

Not an egg carton in sight: Acoustically absorbent materials don't need to look dreadful. Check out this Armstrong ceiling product.

These two concepts are important if we are to understand how sound propagates and interacts with a room. PORE BOX

This gives us a clue to how most ‘porous’ sound absorption works. Materials like, fabrics, acoustic foams and insulation batts have networks of interconnected pores through which the sound travels. ‘Viscous losses’ during this journey turn the acoustic energy into heat. We can straight away understand then that ‘porous’ materials will work best in a high velocity part of the sound wave, because at a high pressure region, air molecules aren’t travelling through the medium to create any losses. This is quite a sticky problem, because most of these types of materials are placed on a wall or a floor where no matter what phase the sound wave is in, the pressure is high and the velocity is low – i.e. the molecules hit the wall and stop. The best we can hope for is to get our absorbing material off the wall at least 90 degrees or a quarter wavelength where there will be a velocity maximum.

This is easy for high frequencies as quarterwavelength is quite short e.g. at 5kHz it is about 17mm. Now it is much more apparent why all of these ‘thin’ materials placed near room surfaces are absorbing all the highs and nothing else. THICK AS

So the first step in getting a more balanced absorption in the room is to get thicker materials, or to place them away from the room surfaces as much as possible. Interestingly, thicker materials sort of waste the material near the wall because the air molecules are not moving much through that part. Standing panels or acoustic foam off the wall on brackets or spacers is the way to go. Curtains and the mesh-type blinds like those used in boardrooms benefit greatly if they can be hung 100mm or more away from the glass. Getting absorbers thick enough to go right down to 100Hz would be totally impractical (a quarter-wavelength is about 860mm). Fortunately there are a few well known, but poorly understood, effects that we can take

advantage of at low frequency. Absorbers placed across the room corners work very well and are commonly termed ‘bass traps’ for this reason. It is also possible to use a different mechanism — resonance — to get low frequency absorption. In this case you use a cavity behind a panel or the mass of air in a hole and get it to resonate at the frequency you want, damp it with some insulation and voilà! It’s not quite that easy, though, and the calculations and construction needed to get it right are uneconomical. Also, they rarely resonate as designed and either don’t span a useful range or if they do, they have a very low absorption coefficient. IF YOU ONLY READ ONE PARAGRAPH…

When looking at solving room acoustics problems with absorption then, it’s a matter of balance. Don’t use too many things that are only useful at high frequencies. Get as much depth or distance from room surfaces as you can and treat the low and mid frequencies with broadband bass traps. 

072

TUTORIAL

Projection Screen Fundamentals The quality and brightness of your image isn’t all about the projector.

To give you a taste of the training material available, InfoComm has made some selected parts of the ‘Essentials of the AV Industry for Technical and Sales Professionals’ course available in AV magazine. This course provides a brief overview of the sales, rental, design, and installation functions, with more in-depth explanations of the science and technology for basic audio, visual and audiovisual systems integration. In this issue we look at an extract from the section on projection.

in a spherical pattern of 180 degrees with the same brightness. Ambient light rejection generally increases as the gain of the screen increases. This is because as the screen gain increases, the light becomes more directional. Reflected ambient light then appears outside the viewing cone. Ambient light will have its own viewing cone, which should be outside the projected image’s viewing cone. If this is not the case, the lights need to be adjusted.

Projectors require a surface to project on, typically a screen. To achieve optimum performance from any projection system, as much attention must be paid to the screen as to the projector. The quality and brightness of a video projector’s image can be greatly influenced by the projection screen. A well designed projection system incorporates a screen type that reflects projected light towards the audience, and is installed such that it does not reflect stray light. Stray light reflected back into the viewing area will cause a loss of contrast and detail, especially in the dark areas of the image. The commercial AV industry uses many types of screens, each suited to a particular purpose. There are two major categories of screens: those used in front projection and those used in rear projection applications. Before discussing the advantages and disadvantages of each, an understanding of some of the terminology and technology should be mastered.

As gain increases, so does hot spotting. Hot spotting is caused by properties of the screen surface. It manifests itself as a brighter area on the screen. If you shine a torch on a wall, the ‘spot’ is not a uniform brightness. The brightest area would be the ‘hot spot’. Screen manufacturers develop surfaces to yield high gain with minimal hot spotting. Hot spotting is one of the trade-offs for screen gain in front projection and some rear projection screens, and is most noticeable when viewing the projected image off-axis.

SCREEN GAIN

The screen is a passive device and does not have the capacity to amplify or create brightness. But the surface of a screen can increase reflected light to multiply projector brightness. Gain is the ability of a screen to redirect projected light to make the image appear brighter, within the viewer axis. The higher the gain number of a screen, the brighter the picture when viewed on axis. A screen should provide uniform brightness over the entire image area, with no dim areas or hot spots. This is referred to as a ‘Unity Gain’ screen, meaning it disperses reflected light evenly and equally

SCREEN HOT SPOTTING

Front Screen Surface Reflectivity:

Angular Reflective

Matte White

Glass Bead

FRONT PROJECTION SURFACES

A front projection screen is a passive reflector of light. We can manipulate how it reflects the light to improve brightness. We apply the laws of physics by changing the screen’s surface, manipulating its position,

and changing its contour. Front projection screens can be made of a variety of surfaces and are usually chosen based on application. A matte white screen evenly disperses light 180 degrees uniformly — both horizontally and vertically, creating a wide viewing cone and wide viewing angle. A matte screen has a smooth non-gloss surface similar to a white sheet. They provide good colour rendition and are the best for data and graphic applications. Glass bead screens are covered with tiny glass beads, each of which provides a spherically reflective surface. They reflect light back at the source, and are best used if the viewer’s eyes are near the same general level as the projector, such as when the projector is positioned at desk top level and the viewing audience is seated. This screen type is good for video and larger-font computer data only. Angularly reflective screen surfaces provide performance similar to that of a mirror. The light is reflected back at the same angle that it strikes the screen, but on the other side of the screen’s axis. If a projector is mounted at a height equal to the top centre of the screen, the viewing cone’s axis would be directed back at the audience in a downward direction. Most high gain screens (with a gain of greater than 5) are of this type. This screen type works well for video. 

About Infocomm: InfoComm International is the international trade association of the professional audiovisual and information communications industries. Established in 1939, InfoComm has 5000 members from more than 70 countries. Its training and education programs, along with its separately administered Certified Technology Specialist (CTS) and corporately administered Certified Audiovisual Solutions Provider (CAVSP) company credentials, set a standard of excellence for AV professionals. Its basic general knowledge course ‘Quick Start to the AV Industry’ is available free of charge from its web site at www.infocomm.org

Think Precision.

Hear Perfection.

074

REVIEW

Sanyo PLC-XL50 Ultra Short-Throw Multimedia Projector Text: / Daniel R. Hampton

This short-throw optical device offers immediate value — big image attraction with ultimate convenience. Place it against the wall, plug it in, turn it on. It’s the office all-rounder. Got stuck with the tiny meeting-room again? No problem, the PLC-XL50 will make light work of it — put it out of the way against the wall, and continue to impress your clients with your award-winning presentation. Upon firing up the projector, the first thing I noticed was… silence. This projector is very quiet, with the eco-fan only producing 29dB, and does not overpower the ambience of the room. And, lo and behold, let there be light. The projector throws up a massive image against the wall, from a mere three inches or so. I can achieve a screen size of 203cm upon my Gilkon projection screen. My next impression: a solid image with clear definition. I am pleased at the initial projection beaming from the PLC-XL50. The colours are vivid and powerful, the graphics crisp and prominent. The projector uses 3-LCD technology employing a 2.0cm LCD panel with a 2000 ANSI lumens brightness rating. Darks are represented surprisingly accurately, and light areas come through cleanly. Any image warp is minimal, and adjustable by the reasonable keystone correction settings. The PLC-XL50 does a great job of displaying multimedia presentations and other interactive material, and I expect will fill a real niche in this market. Wii Wii MONSIEUR

I wonder how the Sanyo unit will handle complex, moving graphics. As I am an occasional hobby gamer, I connected a Nintendo Wii to the minimalist looking PLC-XL50 and find it is a good match in technology, both exhibiting a lean towards

quick setup and minimal fuss, with fast poweron to playing timeframes. The projector is able to give a respectable gaming experience, keeping up with the fast frame-rates of the newer action games while displaying smooth pictures with minimal ghosting. Other gaming consoles work similarly well, with the multimedia projector providing a vivid and powerful gaming experience that copes with the more graphic-intensive titles and also the faster, action-based sports games. Connecting a Windows PC to the projector produces a crisp, saturated image, and it’s able to adapt to most common screen resolutions. The projector does a fine job of typical office Powerpoint slideshows and similarly handles complex 3-D type animation material well too. Using the projector with a DVD player, both in component and S-video modes, provided a reasonable viewing experience, with fast-paced and panning scenery handled suitably well. Plugging an SD digital TV tuner into the projector provided a great television viewing alternative, and the sharp, digital images were reproduced nicely by the PLC-XL50. The projector is compatible with the common HDTV modes (1080i, 720p, 576p, 480p) through the use of the analogue component ports. The overall image presented by this projector is excellent, with only very slight LCD gauge visibility complemented with great colour saturation and worthy dynamic range. While minor key-stoning occurs at some distances, it can be corrected and would be deemed generally suitable for most multimedia purposes. SOUNDS LIKE

I’ve never found built-in projector speaker systems to be amazing, though the sound

system of the PLC-XL50 is decent, and does not become uncomfortable to listen to over longer periods of time. Near maximumsetting volume levels are able to be obtained with minimal speaker output distortion, and this setting is of a good loudness for mediumsized meeting room situations. The onboard control buttons are cleanly laid out and usable in size, providing a quick means to operating the projectors internal settings. Four indicator LEDs are present here for display of various attention signals. A remote-control is provided with the unit, and all features are able to be operated from here also. INTERFACE

The on-screen interface though visibly small in size, is usable, and a multitude of image, screen and input settings can be manipulated through this interface. Particularly, screen-position, zoom-reduction and keystone-distortion can be modified here. For the preservation enthusiast there is also lamp-mode adjustment possible, allowing selection of an eco-mode, ideally extending lamp longevity. A notable feature of this unit is an alarm system, able to warn off potential thieves if the unit is moved from its temporary location. Additionally in the security arena there is a PIN power-on access protection security system that may be enabled if necessary. Offering further customisation is the logo functionality, allowing companies to brand down-time between presentations with their company logo. The Sanyo projector offers a good range of input and output ports. For computer connectivity, there are two (mini D-sub 15pin) RGB inputs, with the second being able to function alternatively as an RGB output monitor. Video input may be connected via

REVIEW

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FEATURE

Price $4999 Sanyo 1300 360 230 www.sanyo.com.au

Pros

the traditional composite RCA video port, or through the higher-resolution three-plug component and S-video connectors. Audio can be connected via the stereo minijack (headphone) plug, or through the stereo RCA connectors. An output port is provided for connecting to additional amplification. A panel of alarm buttons is also present to assist with setup of the projector alarm function. Included with the unit is a CD-ROM based manual, VGA computer connection cable, mounting stand, remote-control, alarm stickers and AC power cable. LONG & SHORT OF IT

Due to the short-throw nature of this projector, it can be utilised in a wide variety

of applications, such as table top map-style projection, and ceiling/floor digital signage. The overhead-style projection comes in particularly useful in the classroom due to its out-of-way nature. The teacher is not blinded by bright projection nor blocking the projector beam while educating the class. Additionally, cords can travel along the floor, rather than mid-air, minimising the potential for injury. I’d recommend purchase of this projector to the medium-enterprise business, where ondemand media services are required on a perroom basis. This unit will find a place within the educational market too. The innovative short-throw nature of this projector provides great installation flexibility and offers a multitude of operational modes.

Can produce big pictures in restricted room spaces Super-quiet operation, minimal ambient noise impact Quick unpack-to-operate timeframe High contrast ratio (600:1) gives good screen performance with most applications Only 7.6kg

Cons Lack of HDMI and DVI digital inputs Large footprint Maximum 1024x768 panel resolution

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076

REVIEW

Aviom Pro64 The Pro64 64-channel digital multicore puzzle is now complete. Text: / Christopher Holder

The brand new 6416m Mic Input Module along with the remote control hardware. The 6416m packs 16 very respectable mic preamps

When Aviom released its A16 personal monitor mixing system back in 2002, squirting multi-channel audio down a Cat5 cable wasn’t particularly revolutionary. Saying that, Cat5 audio was largely the preserve of big installs, like stadiums and shopping centres, and this was the first time it’d been placed into the hands of studios and musicians… who loved it; they still do. They loved the way they could tailor their own monitor mixes and hang multiple mixers off the one system – inexpensive, flexible, easy to use. What people weren’t that concerned about was audio quality – after all, this was ‘just’ for headphone monitoring (mostly) – but Aviom’s own A-Net protocol seemed pretty good. As it turned out, after years of use, the A-Net protocol actually sounded excellent and, along with the very low latency, it got people wondering why it couldn’t be applied to the task of replacing conventional multicores. Re-invigorated, Aviom got to working on its Pro64 range. Using A-Net, the Pro64 system has the ability to send and receive up to 64 channels on a single Cat5 cable. There are a couple of key advantages in switching from a conventional copper multicore to Cat5. The main advantage is flexibility. The Aviom Pro64 system works much like any other Cat5 PC network – if you have the right hub you can park input/output devices just about anywhere you like. Sonically, the big advantage is not having to drive mics down long cable runs. The preamps are on the stage near the mics, not 50 or even 100 metres away. The Pro64 range has been gathering strength for a while now, but the missing piece in the puzzle has been a microphone input module. That has now been released, along with a nifty desktop remote controller. So now seems like the perfect time for a review. Well, actually, this is

more like a user report. AT caught up with the first Australian customer of a fullblown Pro64 setup – System Sound. As many will be aware, System Sound rules the musical theatre market in this country. Whenever a show like Phantom of the Opera or Billy Elliot rolls into the country, more often than not, System Sound will supply all the audio requirements. Currently it’s out and about with some five large theatre shows including Cats in South Korea. I caught up with System Sound’s Julian Spink and Nick Reich to hear their Pro64 experiences. I started out by finding what prompted the purchase. LIKE A PRO Julian Spink: “We had a couple of analogue cores coming to the end of their useful lives, and we had a number of shows coming up, so we thought we’d start investigating the digital alternatives. We were aware of Aviom, because we’ve got quite a few Pro16 headphone systems. They work well and are inexpensive. “The system we’ve purchased here is 64 channels ‘up’ [from stage to FOH] and 32 channels ‘back’ [from FOH to monitors and the PA]. Of the 64 input channels, 32 are mic pres. We’ve also invested in two of the Merger Hubs and the remote control. All up, it’s a cost effective way of getting into this gear, without necessarily spending hundreds of thousands of dollars.” Okay, so let’s look at the key components of the Pro64 range. This isn’t an exhaustive inventory, but it’s representative.

6416i LINE LEVEL INPUT MODULE

The 16-channel line level module features: • 16 balanced line-level analogue inputs (XLR). • 16 balanced line-level analogue thrus (DB25).

• Four gain settings per channel. • Three-segment level meter per channel. • Individual channel activation switches. Julian Spink: “We have four of these devices, comprising one set of 32 line-level inputs and a second set of 32 line-level returns. It works well for us, matching up nicely with the 32 channels of radio mics we have racked up. Interestingly, because of the headroom on the line-level inputs, we had to knock back these line inputs to –6dB, so we’ve got enough headroom out of the Sennheiser 1046 receivers. It just seemed to be a better match.” 6416m MIC INPUT MODULE

Remote controllable 16-channel mic preamp features: • 16 mic-level inputs (XLR). • Switchable pad per channel for line-level inputs. • Passive splitter/alternate input (two DB25s). • Continuously variable gain control per channel, in 1dB steps. • Phase, low-cut filter, and +48V phantom power per channel. • Six-segment level meter per channel. • Individual channel activation switches. • Remote controllable over A-Net with the RCI and MCS combination. Julian Spink: “We have 32 channels (two racks) of mic inputs. It’s great to be able to pop these out like stage boxes, placing them where the microphones are. The mic preamps sound very respectable.” REMOTE CONTROL

The RCI Remote Control Interface and MCS Mic Control Surface combo provides full real-time remote control over 64 channels of mic inputs. The MCS features: • Control of the selected channel’s gain, phase, mute, pad, +48V phantom power,

REVIEW

077

FEATURE

MH10 Merger Hub: Offers 10 bi-directional ports on EtherCon connectors. Allows you to star out rather than daisy chaining input and output devices.

“Run a Cat5 cable out to the OB van, and you have instantaneous splits with no impact on the gain structure at all.”

and low-cut filter. • Metering of a 64-channel network stream, including hi-res metering of the selected channel. • Switchable peak hold. Julian Spink: “It gives us random access to any of the 64 inputs at the stage. You can use it to monitor the mic- and line-level inputs but only remote control of the mic preamp features like gain, phantom, phase etc. Having a readout of all 64 channels is useful – there are 64 bi-colour LEDs so you can see activity and clipping. And there’s a peak hold button, which you can also clear. “You can have four of these RCI/MCS combinations in the system. From the rack input/output device you can decide which ‘control group’ each MCS is looking after – although you can’t have two remotes managing the same input box.” 6416o OUTPUT MODULE

The 6416o provides 16 balanced mic- or line-level analogue outputs from a Pro64 audio network. • 16 balanced mic- or line-level analogue outputs (XLR). • DB25 alternate audio outputs. • Three-segment level meter per channel. • Individual channel activation switches. • Virtual Data Cable connectivity for GPIO, MIDI, and RS232. • Variable sample rates: 44.1k to 192k. • 24-bit D/A converters. System Sound has six of these. Four sit at FOH feeding the console, and two are on stage sending signal to the PA and monitors.

6416i Line level Input Module: Takes 16 inputs, has four gain settings per channel and metering.

MH10 MERGER HUB

The 10-port hub supports bi-directional parallel connections in a Pro64 audio network, and features: • Distribution and merging of up to 10 A-Net streams. • 10 bi-directional ports on EtherCon connectors. • Three channel-routing configurations. • Supports redundant cable paths. Julian Spink: “We have a Merger Hub down at stage and one at FOH. This allows us to run two Cat5e links between stage and FOH – providing for redundancy. Which means, of course, if you pull one out then you won’t get a break in the audio. The hub allows you to star out to each component – no need to daisy chain units. On stage we have four input devices going into the hub. There’s a fibre version of the hub but we decided to stick with one transmission medium – Cat5e.” DATA TRANSMISSION

Those are the main components but what are the key features that have caught Julian and Nick’s fancy? Julian Spink: “It has an extremely powerful data transmission system – RS232, MIDI and GPIO. For us, we run RS232 and MIDI in shows as a matter of course, so this has been quite handy. For example, we might use it to remotely trigger a conductor track. There are 14 ‘VDC’ slots, with any of the 6416 series boxes acting as a data input or output device. RS232 – being a bi-directional protocol – takes up two slots, so when you assign it to, say, Slot 1, it automatically occupies Slot 2 as

well. It’s also worth noting that it’s not an RS232 distribution system, but point-topoint. For example, we run a little device that allows the backstage folk to type on a keyboard, which shows up on a matching LCD at FOH. So if there’s a microphone fault or something urgent that needs to be communicated with the FOH operator that can’t be done using a two-way... then it gets typed. So we are able to use Aviom’s VDC to carry the RS232 to and fro. With MIDI it gets better because the data is not point-to-point. Instead, any device can pick up the MIDI output if it’s set to the right slot – it’s a MIDI distribution system. Over the years we’ve had some problems with long haul MIDI transfer so this feature has been very useful.” PREAMP SOUND Nick Reich:

“We did an A/B test using the preamp in the 6416m Mic Input Module and a high-end Amek preamp going into the Aviom 6416i line level module using the same mic – an AKG C414EB. We A/B’ed by switching between the dual inputs of the same channel on the Cadac J Type. If pushed, I guess you’d say the Amek’s sound was preferable on the key jangle test wearing headphones, but there wasn’t much in it. Even if you were doing a critical orchestral recording, you might think about using esoteric high-end pre’s on the main microphone pair and the Aviom pre’s would be more than adequate on everything else.” The Pro64 is 24-bit and is capable of sampling up to 192k. Julian Spink: “As far as the sampling rate goes, for our purposes running 48k is fine.

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Double the sample rate and you halve the channel count. Double it again (176.4k and 192k) and you drop to 16 channels up and back. The top-end detail is more revealing at the higher sample rates, but like all of these things, you can only tell when you directly compare.” FLEXIBILITY Julian Spink:

The Merger Hub has four modes. The default Auto mode gives you 64 channels in total, which go in every direction in whatever configuration you might have –any and all of the inputs will turn up in any of the output units. It’s the ‘no-brainer’ mode. We use a mode called Managed C where the eighth Ethercon output on the back of the hub has a local mimic of 64 input channels. Which means you can take a split out for monitors, or for recording or the like. It’s very useful: you want more splits? Then buy or rent more boxes and plug in the Cat5 cable. Nick Reich: “Half-way into a twoyear show season it’s not uncommon for someone to decide they want to do a live recording. Having to insert analogue splitters for a week is a huge imposition, it means your entire orchestra balance goes out the window. No matter what you do, and no matter how carefully you do it, just a fact the additional load from the splitters onto the mics will change the gain of the mics. “With the Pro64, taking a split is completely transparent, and has no effect on the rest of the system. Run a Cat5 cable out to the OB van, and you have instantaneous splits with no impact on the gain structure at all.” GOTCHAS

I asked Julian what disappointed or surprised him about the Pro64. Julian Spink: “One ‘gotcha’ that took us a little while to nut out happens after changing ‘Slots’ – each device will occupy a bank of 16 channels, or what Aviom call ‘a Slot’. When you change the slot, the system automatically mutes all that device’s inputs. And it’s not something you can un-mute remotely, you have to manually press the switch on each channel after the reassignment. That had us scratching our heads for a while.

REVIEW

“The other caveat: ensure you have a good connection between each and every device. If there’s a dodgy connection then you’ll experience a very clean, very graceful dropout. After about three seconds of silence – long enough to think, “what’s going on here?” – the audio returns. The advantage of this is that you can pull out a Cat5 cable while you have a full-blown self-powered PA going full throttle and you won’t hear any splats, cracks or farts – it disconnects extremely cleanly. The downside is it’s very hard to hunt down the culprit if there’s a momentary drop out. “Finally, it’s worth remembering that Pro64 doesn’t go beyond 64 inputs. For us, that is a little disappointing. Our ideal core would be 96 inputs and 24 or 32 returns. To get more inputs you need to set up a parallel Pro64 system.” (MULTI)CORE MARKET

Thanks to Julian, Nick and System Sound for the benefit of their experience. Which leaves me to sign off by asking: who is likely to buy a Pro64 rig? I don’t think Aviom considered the likes of System Sound (a high-end musical theatre production company) as its core market. But the fact that System Sound relies on analogue consoles (Cadacs mostly) illustrates a point. Any live venue install — pubs, clubs, RSLs, churches etc — where the client is happy with its analogue console, then a Pro64 upgrade to the multicore is well worth looking into. Even the cloth-eared will hear the difference immediately and the Aviom option will afford you and the client the flexibility of scaling and re-configuring the system as and when required. Smaller AV rental companies will also see the benefits of Pro64. A Pro64 system will slip seamlessly into your existing rig and you lose about half a tonne of copper multicore into the bargain. A-Net is a proven performer. It’s a great-sounding digital transmission protocol and after six years there’s no question mark over its dependability. Crucially, the final piece in the puzzle, the 6416m Mic Input Modules sounds pretty good as well. Finally, I think we can say, the Aviom Pro64 is a complete system. 

Price 6416i: $6425; 6416m: 13,395; 6416o: $6450; 6416dio: $6450; MCS: $1669; MH10: $3295. Contact Production Audio Services (03) 9264 8000 info@productionaudio.com.au www.productionaudio.com.au

Pros A cleaner sound without the artefacts of long cable runs. Much lighter than a conventional multicore. Flexible/reconfigurable. Low latency. Nifty ‘data’ transmission features. Fanless (no noise) and can handle high temperatures.

Cons Hard to trust a 15¢ plastic RJ45 connector, even when housed in an Ethercon. Constrained to 64 inputs.

Summary A professional, flexible, scalable and fairly-priced replacement for a traditional multicore. It happily retrofits into any install with analogue consoles (as well as some Yamaha digital consoles), and will certainly be useful to any AV hire businesses requiring such a (light) system.

Part of System Sound's on-stage I/O. 32 channels of line-level I/O are married to the Sennheiser receivers, while the new mic preamp inputs can be positioned as required, much like a standard stage box.

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REVIEW

Inter-M PX8000 System An 8x8 matrix with real knobs and faders… and some hidden depths. Text: / Graeme Hague

The Inter-M PX8000 (8x8) audio matrix system is a fully configurable controller for routing up to eight audio sources, which Inter-M calls ‘BGM’ (or BackGround Music) to any of eight destination zones. But that’s by no means the end of the story. Add in four RJ45 sockets for Inter-M’s own RM8000 remote microphone consoles and another eight RJ45 sockets for the LM8000 remote wall-mount controls and the scene is set for a rather alarming number of possible signal routing paths. Note that the PX8000 is a controller only — it doesn’t offer any amplification. Each of the eight zones is fed out as a balanced line-level signal. All eight of the matrix input connections are pairs of standard RCA jacks accompanied by a rotary line level adjustment. The outputs use a three-pin Phoenix connector similar to the sort of thing you’d use to connect figure-8 cable. Beside each output are rotary bass and treble controls providing ±12dB of highand low-pass filter. Immediately it struck me that the input levels and tone controls are a good idea, but I imagine that by the time everything is plugged they’re going to be difficult to access — not to mention that they’re located on the back on the unit. Volume for each of the eight output zones is controlled by a single 60mm fader, and above this is a selector for which BGM source it receives. Any zone can link to any BGM, so for example, all the zones can listen to Input 1. However, you can’t provide a mix of BGM: a zone can only be fed one BGM source at a time. LM8000: ZONED OUT CONTROL

At the other end of the line, the destination zone can be just an amplifier handling a

mono signal. But in an ideal Inter-M world you’ve installed the LM8000 remote Control, giving that zone its own volume… and more. However, control of the volume has to be assigned to the LM8000 via a dedicated button on the front panel of the master control unit. Either one or the other has control — they don’t compete. A Select button on the remote control allows you to choose the BGM source that comes from the PX8000. The LM8000 panel also has a minijack line input and a 6.5mm balanced microphone input, both with their own level controls. These will work regardless of who has a hand on the volume control, although passing the responsibility to the wall remote is obviously going to work best. Effectively, you’re turning that zone into a separate PA system that you can use for a local lectern or a line-level signal from a portable mixer or replay device. It’s worth pointing out that while the microphone input is balanced, there is no phantom power. CONNECTOR BEWILDERMENT

Back at the master PX8000 front panel, there’s a 6.5mm input for a paging microphone and the ability to choose each zone; a selection thereof; or an overriding ‘All’ button to reach everywhere. The paging mic also has its own level, bass and treble controls. The choice of a 6.5mm connection is a slight disappointment. It’s a minor thing, but the PX8000 is a rackmount unit and usually a rack of AV and PA gear is exactly that — a stand-alone rack against the wall with no place for putting any paging microphone, plus a cable is going to be left hanging. I think a better idea would have been

an XLR connection, exactly as Inter-M has in its own remote microphone console (RM8000) to take a gooseneck mic. In fact, why not just a good in-built mic? The PX8000 does have an internal chime which is variable in nature via a dip-switch selector. At the other end of the panel is a selector for choosing what is monitored through a small speaker on the fascia and a volume control for this. RM8000 — MIC STATION

The RM8000 remote microphone is an impressive desktop model. You can set it up to broadcast to any of the eight zones. Just to clarify, these aren’t a better-featured remote control like the wall-mount fixture. It can’t control any zone volume and has no line input. It’s more of a broadcast substation or, if you have multiples, one can be considered as the main station. It also has a dip-switch for choosing an internal chime. The Inter-M system can accommodate four of these remote mic consoles, and there are LED indicators on each to let you know — seen in combination with the zone selection buttons — if any of the other three are broadcasting to the same area and causing a block. The four connections are prioritised (from one to four) and, in certain circumstances, a lower number will override other stations. Individual volume controls are on the back of the PX8000 and an output control is on the remote console along with a volume knob for the speaker (monitor) in the base of the microphones. One interesting omission: there is no facility on the PX8000 to ‘lock out’ any of the remote mics. So potentially, the annual board meeting in one zone might be interrupted by the receptionist singing

REVIEW

FEATURE

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PX8000 Audio Matrix

RM8000 Mic Station

LM8000 Remote Control

happy birthday to Bob in Despatch. The main PX8000 unit has an inbuilt digital recorder with capacity for a 30-second message and playback that’s triggered by up to eight external switch closures. The idea is a direct connection to a fire alarm system and that any trip switches or emergency buttons would also begin the 30-second message. Something like ‘run for your lives!’ probably. Other uses do come to mind — a network of Stop buttons to alert the building to a workplace accident or a security breach. CHAINING THE PX8000

Finally, on the rear of the PX8000 is a batch output for connecting to a suitable eight-channel amplifier — it’s not clear if the bass and treble controls for each output are still effective — and D-Sub 25P link for chaining additional PX8000 units. This would provide extra zones that will respond to the (now) Master PX8000’s BGM inputs, ‘All’ paging commands, chimes and emergency triggers. These zones can also have their own wall remotes

(the LM8000’s). Any connected RM8000 microphones only affects the zones to which their own PX8000 is linked. For instance, an RM8000 plugged into a slave PX8000 can’t broadcast to zones connected to the Master. The BGM inputs on slave units become redundant. REAL CONTROL

DSP-based matrix devices like a dbx ZonePro and the like have all but taken over the 8x8 market. But, for many operators, there’s still something very reassuring about the PX8000’s real knobs and sliders. In other words it’s an easy, uncomplicated, and cost-effective device to pitch at the uninitiated. The flipside of that, is the hidden depths. By which I mean, if you start to employ the remotes and the mic stations it’d be quite easy to underutilise rather than over-utilise the PX8000. But with careful planning, many smaller venues would find a good use for all eight inputs and zones. Of course, this system isn’t just for background music and paging announcements. Show relay facilities, for

example, can be significantly enhanced. Likewise, with the proper prioritising of the remote microphone stations you can create extra communications and still maintain discretion and some control on confidentiality. On the downside, as I mentioned earlier, the volume and tone controls on the rear panel aren’t going to get the attention they deserve given the tangle of cables they’ll no doubt be buried under. And the manual lapses into some confusing Korean-lish like ‘Deliver your voice to the phone’. Otherwise, the PX8000 will provide the right solutions for a lot of PA networks. Too often, we run out of options when we’re installing a public address system for a venue: we’re left wanting one more input, one more zone… Instead, put in a PX8000 right from the start and be spoilt for choice. Price: PX8000 $2200; RM8000 $610; LM8000 $220. Magna Systems: (02) 9417 1111 or photson@magnasys.tv

Sign of the Times Graeme Hague’s appreciation of digital signage scales new heights. Text: Graeme Hague

Whenever I drive past the theatre at which I gave some of the best years of my working life and see the large LED ‘Coming Attractions’ sign doing its stuff on the front wall, I can’t help but being reminded of its genesis — the years of pain and the comedy of errors we endured before we actually got something that worked. Everyone has seen the opening titles of Fawlty Towers, right? The hotel has one of those signs where the letters can be swapped around to suit and poor Basil endures someone constantly changing it to ‘Flowery Twats’ and the like. Well, we started out with one of those signs. A nightmare invention, I might add. The problem was exacerbated by the fact we lived in a part of Western Australia where a howling gale came off the southern Indian Ocean… oh, about 360 days of the year. In other words, it was not a place to be mounting stick-on letters to a neon-filled sign in the middle of the car park. The sign was about 2.5m wide and 3m high. It took eight lines of text with around 23 characters each line on both sides. That’s a lot of letters to stick on, but with the marketing department usually attempting to fit a week’s worth of events on the sign, items like ‘The Royal Ballet of Copenhagen’ along with the performance dates still needed some clever abbreviation. The whole thing was mounted on a brick column with the sign’s base about four metres above the ground — plenty of height to dissuade any would-be anagram creators. The standard procedure for changing the sign’s content was a long extension ladder and a tight sphincter. The letters were photocopied on clear overhead transparency film and sticky-taped to the back of a single piece of thin Perspex that was slid into each line. Trying to feed this long, floppy piece of plastic into the slot was a challenge while you kept your balance on the ladder. Actually, the best procedure was to avoid being rostered on Monday mornings at all and the job was given to some other mug. Mother Nature stepped in and made a bad situation worse. One day we discovered the brick columns had succumbed to an

overnight storm and the sign was slightly offkilter with cracks in some of the supporting masonry. The optimists among us heralded this as a portent [a sign from heaven? — Ed.] and that we’d get a new sign — brilliant. Sure enough, the council did deem the structure unsafe and applied to the insurance company for a replacement. Did I say ‘council’ and ‘insurance’? You can guess what’s coming. Between the bureaucracy of the council and the insurance company looking for loopholes (the sign wasn’t attached to the building and therefore not technically part of it) there ensued months of beating around the bush. In the meantime we couldn’t have an unsightly, empty ‘Coming Attractions’ sign — it was still kind of usable, the structural damage wasn’t obvious and in some cases we were contractually obligated to announce a show’s imminent arrival on this sign. Trouble was, we couldn’t lean the extension ladder on the brickwork anymore (according to the council noddys), because it might fall over and kill someone — possibly one of us, but they were more worried about passing rate payers. The contraption was too high for any A-Frame ladder and the stage tallescope’s lowest setting was… too low. The stroke of genius from management was to dispense with the Perspex and go back to individual plastic letters and a Dalek-like rubber sucker on the end of this very long pole. Eurgh. Thanks to the wind, most of the letters ended up in the estuary. Over a year later the brick column was demolished and a similar sign erected on the front of the building. We’re still using stickytape and slide unwieldy bits of plastic into slots. At least now the sign is raised and lowered by a winch, but it emits an horrendous screeching noise like a hundred fingernails on a hundred blackboards, a noise so vile it stuns passing migratory whales offshore… and the highest slot still needs a ladder (footed on steps, no less). Theoretically, this was progress. In reality, we continued to avoid being rostered on Mondays. Finally, plans were announced to purchase a real electronic sign. It was a champagne moment. The marketing girls envisaged

something that could display high-resolution video about the size of the MCG scoreboard. The finance department, cooking the capital equipment budget, was envisaging something more along the lines of those red LED, twodigit signs that say your counter meal is ready. Months of investigation into the possibilities revealed that the world of large, external visual displays is a bewildering maze of different systems, different formats of those systems and different control interfaces. Sales reps can get very excited about their AV products. They show you photographs of entire buildings in Paris or New York covered in projected hieroglyphics and then look crestfallen when told the budget wouldn’t cover the airfare to go and just have a look. Eventually, the concept of an LED-based sign got the thumbs-up. Now all that had to be done was explain to a board of management, several accountants and other bored-looking councillors the differences between pixel size, pixel resolution, tri-colour, full-colour, RGB… and you could chuck in the widescreen versus 4:3 debate for good measure. The marketing department were still keen on something of photo-like quality despite the limitations of LED technology while the budget gurus started their bidding at a one-colour, onepixel design and fought tooth and nail over any improvement. Of course, the decision was ultimately a budgetry one. Sometimes, the consumer (myself in this case) has to trust the experts (you, dear reader) and say “this is how much I’ve got — what can you do for me?” I’d resigned by the time the new sign was in place, but I can see they’ve had the commonsense to buy a large, colourful display that’s programmable from the safety of the nearest PC workstation. There’s no ladders, no sticky-tape and no chance of being crushed under a ton of bricks, if the breeze picks up. That’s got to be progress, right?  AV welcomes insightful and less-than-serious contributions to the Termination page. Contact the editor andy@av.net. au if you would like to add your voice to the rich tapestry of audiovisual industry culture.

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Bosch Communications Systems James Ruse Business Park • Unit 2C, 6 Boundary Road • Northmead NSW 2152 Phone: +61 2 9683 4752 • Fax: +61 2 9890 5928 • Email: stsales@au.bosch.com • www.boschsecurity.com.au