Temple Denver

Almost every week a tour manager called to ask whether we could do something else with the video. We sent our specs out in advance, and it did not matter. The big-name DJs would show up with a touring VJ and a drive full of 4K content, and we would watch them try to figure out how to run it on three screens that were each 48 by 48 pixels. The main room's entire resolution was smaller than an app icon. It was comical, and it was also a problem I could somewhat fix.

I needed a bigger canvas without tearing out the hardware. Resolume Arena was already pushing slices of video to the converter boxes for the screens, and Madrix was driving the floor-to-ceiling frosted pixel pillars. I bridged the two machines over NDI so content could cross between them, then networked the Road Hog console to send DMX triggers to the video rig, the pillars, the orb, and the hallway computers. That gave us live master intensity and speed for the whole room from one desk.

Mapping a low-resolution mesh onto the pillars was the headache. The pixel spacing was not an even grid, so scaling an irregular shape across the walls never quite lined up. If I were starting from scratch I would run everything through Madrix. But combined, the room became one uninterrupted canvas just under 200 pixels wide. The test was text. Once we could scale a few words down and read them across the whole room, it was one show, and the touring VJs had somewhere to put their content.