Expo City steps up to grandMA3

Agora completes an upgrade of Al Wasl Plasa’s lighting system, updating its show files to make the most of its existing MA Lighting grandMA3 setup.

Al Wasl Plasa has been front and centre of Dubai’s entertainment offering since it was unveiled at Expo 2020. Now the shining light of legacy project Expo City, the iconic dome recently received an upgrade to its lighting system, enabling shows to be programmed in MA Lighting grandMA3 software.

Ag ora is responsible for the supply, installation, maintenance and operation of the system, and the company’s HOD Lighting, Fabrizio Ganzerli, explained the rationale behind the decision to move over to MA’s latest platform.

“The lighting, console and computing unit control system at Al Wasl Plasa has always been grandMA3, but until recently all the programming was done using the grandMA2 system because the new software was not yet ready and reliable to be used at the time of installation,” he said.

“The MA2 system is amazing, but sooner or later this system will become redundant and MA3 will take over completely. Therefore, switching to MA3 was always going to need to happen at some point.”

With the quieter summer season incoming and the MA3 software now at a point where they were comfortable implementing it, Ganzerli and his team opted to make the change.

“It took us around three months to migrate all the show files,” he recalled. “MA’s migration tool was great to copy over all the cues and fixtures. However, I had to manually input all macros, effects, presets and timecode.” According to

Ganzerli, the most time-consuming part of the project was transferring the effects from the MA2 to the MA3 show file. “The show was created by Woodroffe Bassett Design, and it is stunning but extremely complex, with over 10,000 effects running. It was a huge job, but it provided a chance to dig deeper into the system and learn more about its intricacies,” he recalled.

Now the system is operating on MA3 mode, Ganzerli reported a significant uptick in performance. “Once we switched to the MA3 system, the hardware immediately worked much faster,” he stated.

“We run a 175MB show file with more than 7,000 presets, so it’s not small. Before, to upload the show file or work on the patch, the network was quite heavy, and you could feel how much work it was going through. Now the system feels light and fast, because the MA3 is optimised for the software it’s running.”

Th e system has already been put through its paces, being operated on the Road to COP28 event as well as a special production that ran throughout Ramadan. “It’s done a great job so far, and we know that we are now future-proofed,” Ganzerli concluded. “The season has come to an end now, but once we start back up again in September, we’ll be ready and waiting with this state-of-the-art system.”

Photos: Agora www.agora.ae www.malighting.com