Night of the Proms is a high profile music and entertainment spectacular which combines popular classical music with pop. Night of the Proms 2009 is the 25th anniversary tour, featuring OMD and marking the first reunion of Swedish rock stars, Roxette. Sharon den Adel from Within Temptation, jazz legend Toots Thielemans and Peter and Zoltan Katona also appear in the show, which will tour for 40 dates across five European countries in front of a total of 600,000 audience members.
Production company, EML, has supplied lighting, sound and large format projection – powered by two ArKaos A10 media servers – for the tour.
Olivier Demoustier, EML’s Light Designer, began by spending a week in a WYSIWYG studio, setting up and testing the show, before taking two days to program over 3000 cues for the 3 hour show and synchronizing them with the live orchestra.
The content for the two video screens is managed by two ArKaos A10 media servers running the latest version, 1.1, of the MediaMaster software. These are controlled through ArtNet by a ChamSys MQ200 Pro lighting desk which simultaneously controls the lighting.
The servers display visuals on a 1024×768 ShowLED backdrop which fills the entire back of the stage and a 800×600 LED screen composed of Element Labs modules. Olivier used a VNC client to bring the interfaces from the servers to the front-of-house so that they could stay close to the screens.
Olivier comments: ”ArKaos combines greatly with professional lighting desks such as the ChamSys MQ200: since they both support MSEx, I can see the thumbnails from MediaMaster directly on the console and even get live feedback of the servers’ output. When there’s 15,000 people in front of the stage, it’s good to know that you can’t go wrong displaying your visuals!”
EML challenged ArKaos to make some modifications to MediaMaster for this particular show to ensure perfect synchronization of the visuals with the sound. ArKaos’ developers therefore worked closely with Olivier and the EML crew to fine-tune the playback speed functions (the LTC time code) in the application. As a result, this new development will be included in the next release of MediaMaster so it can be of benefit to everyone.
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