MANNHEIM, Germany — German rock band Böhse Onkelz (Bad Uncles) performed a reunion show on one of the largest stages ever constructed in Europe. The event was staged at the Hockenheimring race track, south of Mannheim, and drew close to 200,000 fans. On stage were four 35-meter high LED towers, spanning over one hundred meters, which were pixel mapped with an assist from Avolites Media’s Ai S8 HD media servers provided by Einstein and Sons.
More details from Avolites Media (www.avolitesmedia.com):
Roland Greil and Thomas Döhring of German visual production company Einstein and Sons supplied and controlled the Ai S8 servers, which were sending out multiple full 1080p HD feeds.
The three servers shared the management of live feed, pre-designed graphic content, I-Mag feed, and pre-visualization. Two further S8 servers were supplied by Einstein and Sons as backup. Lighting and set design was by Jerry Appelt.
“Ai was perfect for this project for a number of reasons – the pre-visualisation is great because you can see the concept beforehand without having the whole kit on site,” says Roland Greil. “This meant that we could show the band what it would look like in reality during our pre-programming sessions, with all the LED surfaces and screens in the right position in the virtual world already.
“We could also merge the outward signal of our pre-visualisation Ai system with our lighting visualisation on MA 3D system, so we had the whole set up with lighting – all 1500 lights and the whole video surface in one virtual screen.”
On site, one Ai server powered the main content to hi-res towers and low-res towers, the second served the IMAGS and the pixel mapping, and the third was a preview server which took care of some of the workload of the other machines, including the images, the hi-res outputs, low-res, and pixel mapping. Two backup servers were also rigged, but were not needed on the night.
“We could have achieved the show with just one server, but on such a scale you want to make sure the latency is as low as possible and the performance is always on a high level because we use up to eight different full HD layers per output,” adds Griel.
Avolites Media’s Arran Rothwell-Eyre assisted the team on site for the first week of pre-production and for six days on site for pre-show set up.
Rothwell-Eyre comments: “In this show we took full advantage of being able to program our own shader code to allow us flexibility and precise control of the effects and processing that we wanted. We also made good use of the visualiser in pre-production, allowing us to combine the video and lighting visualisations, to get a good understanding of what the overall show would be like.”
