ATLANTA— At this year’s annual Passion gathering of Christian college students, 40,000 young people ages 18 to 25 filled three arenas to worship, pray and hear inspirational speakers. This three-day conference, held January 2-4, 2016, featured a multimedia extravaganza managed through TNDV’s mobile production infrastructure, including and big screen displays of video, lyrics and scripture delivered from Renewed Vision’s ProPresenter 6 media presentation software.
More details from TNDV (www.tndv.com):
While attendees of this high-energy event packed with live music and performances were spread across three simultaneous shows—Atlanta’s Philips Arena and Infinite Energy Center, and the Toyota Center in Houston—they coalesced into a unified experience. Video of each arena’s show was shared between locations via a dedicated fiber optic network, and streamed globally to more than 150,000 viewers.
“Passion is a very fast-paced, free-flowing event where intricate planning is subject to many last minute changes,” said Brad Weston, President of Renewed Vision. “The ability to be flexible was absolutely critical.” Weston served as a hands-on operator during the event along with several other Renewed Vision employees, including Renewed Vision Partner Greg Dolezal, who served as the live producer at Philips Arena.
“Leveraging a unique Stage Display function and other presentation management tools in ProPresenter 6,” Weston added, “We provided a video feed containing a master clock and other vital program information to the speakers and performers on-stage. This kept the three shows synchronized and on schedule.”
The Philips Arena, which served as the hub, distributed the master clock and multiviewer monitor video from TNDV’s HDTV truck Aspiration to the other arenas so they could pace themselves accordingly. Sending the master clock and multiviewer video was one of many key responsibilities of TNDV, which also parked its Inspiration HD truck at the Infinite Energy Center; and its Elevation HD truck at the Toyota Center.
TNDV replay operators cached the video of each arena show onto EVS servers on each truck to provide a time-shift delay, enabling the other two venues to present it at the most opportune times during their shows. TNDV also provided nine Hitachi SK-HD1000 broadcast cameras and four Panasonic robotic cameras per venue—39 cameras in total—as well as displays, integrated routing systems and other support gear.
“Passion is an exciting event that always strives to break barriers, and try new and different things each year,” said Rob Devlin, TNDV’s General Manager and Project Manager for Passion 2016. “This was TNDV’s sixth consecutive Passion event. Having our HD trucks at each Passion venue gave us tremendous flexibility in handling last minute program requests and on-the-fly changes.”
While the TNDV trucks switched the multi-camera show for each venue, the ProPresenter 6 units, which reside on TNDV’s trucks, delivered multiple outputs of media to multiple big-screen displays. Operators can plan the media presentation in advance or on the fly using ProPresenter 6’s many features to craft a custom show using any elements they desire. For example, they can synchronize CG lyrics with worship songs, lower third supers over speakers, video playout of all pre-produced videos, and transitional effects and graphics, with an alpha channel for keying and layering. ProPresenter 6 can control all aspects of the live non-camera video elements.
ProPresenter was initially developed to handle the multimedia presentation demands of Passion and other large Christian events, and it’s played a pivotal role at every Passion conference since 2000. “Since our software developers have hands-on experience operating our products at every major Passion conference, and because Passion is such an avant-garde production, we gained valuable insight into new features and capabilities that should be built into our next releases,” said Weston.
He added, “Our close Passion relationship has helped us develop ProPresenter 6 into a proven, full-featured video playout engine robust enough for the most challenging multimedia presentation editing, planning and management.”
