ROE Visual was an official event supplier for the Eurovision Song Contest 2024, held in Malmö this May. Partnering with Creative Technology, ROE Visual’s cutting-edge LED products delivered a spectacular visual experience, enhancing the event’s global broadcast and live performances.
Eurovision Song Contest, renowned for its intricate production and spectacular designs, selected ROE Visual again to supply top-tier LED technology, including the Black Marble BM4 Floor, Vanish V8T cubes, over a kilometer of ROE Strip, and the stunning Black Quartz BQ4 main wall. This combination provided exceptional visuals that captivated the in-house audience and over 160 million viewers worldwide. Creative Technology flawlessly executed the event, ensuring seamless integration and performance.
The stage design, masterminded by veteran Eurovision production designer Florian Wieder and international lighting and screens designer Fredrik Stormby, showcased a harmonious blend of lighting and visuals. ROE Visual’s LED panels were central to this design, creating a dynamic and immersive environment.
The design’s key elements included:
- LED Floor: The cross-shaped stage featured 186 sqm of Black Marble BM4 LED panels, offering a stunning extra visual dimension to many performances.
- Movable LED Cubes: 460 sqm of Vanish V8T transparent LED panels formed five moving squares, with each cube side highlighted with ROE Strip.
- Main Wall: The 340 sqm Black Quartz BQ4 LED panels served as the impressive back wall, including a spectacular opening sequence for the green room.
Overall, the event utilized 1100 meters of ROE Strip around all cubes and lighting pods, enhancing the overall visual impact.
The Black Marble floor played a crucial role in the setup, both as a visual element and as a tool to ensure the precise and rapid placement of props. While the Eurovision production team faced the challenge of executing swift changeovers within a mere 50 seconds, utilizing digital markers on the Black Marble floor allowed for fast and accurate positioning of props, significantly enhancing the efficiency and overall flow of the event. This level of precision was essential in maintaining the show’s high standards and ensuring a seamless viewing experience for both live and broadcast audiences. “The Black Marble LED floor allowed us to manage the rapid changeovers with unparalleled accuracy, ensuring that every prop was in place exactly when and where it needed to be.”
Creative Technology delivered all the equipment and the technical infrastructure for light, sound, and visuals and employed state-of-the-art equipment to ensure flawless execution. Based on an all-ROE Visual LED set, the technical setup included Helios LED processing and Disguise media. The production was meticulously time-coded, from camera shots to LED screen content, ensuring perfect synchronization.
The technical preparation was extensive, involving rigorous planning and testing. The team used comprehensive LED monitoring systems, including Megapixels’s Omnis and Faber’s FRM systems, logging data from all LED panels.
For the first time, the entire LED system at Eurovision operated on an SMPTE 2110 network. This groundbreaking setup utilized a robust 2-core system with 42 x 100G connections, ensuring maximum efficiency and reliability. The switch to fiber optic technology allowed for unprecedented data transfer rates, which is crucial to obtain the high demands for a live event of this scale.
The Eurovision production processed an astounding 1.2 terabytes of data per second, equivalent to streaming 100,000 4K Netflix movies simultaneously. The fiber optic network made this monumental amount of data handling possible, surpassing copper cables’ limitations.
The monitoring system kept real-time logs of all the LED panels, detecting any potential issues before they could impact the performance. In the rare event of a problem, the system would switch over seamlessly, ensuring the audience experienced no disruption. All monitoring was conducted offline for cybersecurity reasons, with alerts sent via SMS to the technical team if a processor issue was detected.
“Our advanced network and monitoring capabilities were crucial in delivering a flawless visual experience at Eurovision,” said Niclas Ljung, CTO at Creative Technology. “The transition to a full 2110 network and the redundancy measures we implemented ensured that the show ran smoothly”.
ROE Visual thanks Creative Technology and the entire Eurovision production team for their outstanding work. The Eurovision Song Contest 2024 showcases the power of cutting-edge LED technology and ROE Visual’s commitment to excellence, innovation, and collaboration.
