LAS VEGAS – Blackmagic Design noted that its Teranex AV was used for signal conversions on American pop rock band Train’s “Play That Song” summer tour. The tour began in May in Las Vegas and ran through mid-July before heading to Europe and the UK, wrapping up Oct. 25 in Northern Ireland.
More details from Blackmagic Design (www.blackmagicdesign.com):
Several additional Blackmagic Design products were also used on the tour, including a Videohub CleanSwitch 12×12 router with Videohub Smart Control, HyperDeck Studio Pro broadcast deck, SmartView Duo monitor and UltraStudio 4K capture and playback device.
Since first reaching the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1998 with their song “Meet Virginia,” Train has been topping the charts with hits like “Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me),” “Calling All Angels” and “Hey, Soul Sister.” To promote their latest album, A Girl, a Bottle, a Boat, the band embarked on 2017’s “Play That Song” concert tour along with opening acts O.A.R. and Natasha Bedingfield.
Production Designer Robb Jibson, of Chicago production design firm So Midwest, Inc., noted that during the tour, the Teranex AV was used to convert HDMI signals from a D3 media server into SDI for the video wall to receive.
“We were really excited by the Teranex AV for a couple of reasons, primarily because it allowed us to take one 4K HDMI signal out of our media server and get four discreet 1080 SDI signals,” said Robb. “One of the problems we’ve always had when using separate converters was that a computer has to clock the outputs, so trying to get four individual boxes to sync different outputs with the same frame rate and refresh rate was a pain. Now that we’re able to get one output from all four, we can send a lot more pixels all in sync. So if we’re playing back one clip across a lot of different surfaces, all the information is arriving at the same time. The low latency of the Teranex AV is a huge benefit, especially in a concert setting.”
Two outputs from the Teranex AV were fed into a Videohub CleanSwitch 12×12 with Videohub Smart Control. A backup D3 media server and backup Teranex AV were also fed into the CleanSwitch so that in the event of a failure, the Videohub Smart Control would trigger a macro to switch the CleanSwitch to the other inputs. Robb also used three inputs on the Teranex AV as a distribution amplifier for the cameras, so that the media server only saw one input, but the team had four input options. The Videohub Smart Control allowed the team to look at different angles while setting up and to test the setup to make sure all four inputs were present.
The team also used several HyperDeck Studio Pros for recording and playing back commercials in between sets, as well as a SmartView Duo to monitor video backstage as it was happening onstage. Robb also implemented an UltraStudio 4K as an input and output box to see pre-rendered content live in the media server prior to having to render its final comps.
“We used to make content, export it to a file and then load the file on a separate computer for playback to see how it was going to look,” said Robb. “And we never fully saw how it was going to look until we got into the venues, which were all different. We realized we could use a D3 stage visualizer with an UltraStudio 4K as an input and be able to see how our edits looked live as we were making them. We made the UltraStudio 4K a secondary display from our computer. This saved us the process of rendering time and file transfer. That was awesome.”
Robb concluded, “Blackmagic Design products have been great for speeding up various parts of our workflow. In a concert tour environment where you’re on the move every day, setting up in a new place each night, any time you can save along the way is a huge help. These products were key for us and helped us immensely as we worked hard to make this tour a smashing success.”
