CT provides winning combination

Creative Technology Shanghai, a division of leading audiovisual services company Creative Technology Group (CT), provided the HD content management and playback system for the massive 4,000m2 LED screen that was a central feature of director Zhang Yimou’s extravagant Opening Ceremony for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games at the Bird’s Nest Stadium on 8th August.

Drawing on both equipment and skills from within its international organisation, as well as the experience gained from numerous sporting events it has been involved in, including the last Olympic Games held in Athens in 2004, CT once again delivered a highly professional service that marks it as a leader in the field of world class events.

For the Opening Ceremony, CT Shanghai was contracted directly by the Beijing Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (BOCOG), and spent nearly two years working on the project.

The heart of its system consisted of six Pronto HD hard disk video player/recorders, manufactured by DVS of Germany, feeding the six main sections of the screen, with additional channels feeding the legacy screens within the stadium, as well as the video starfield that covered the entire field of play. In all, 22 channels of HD playback were utilised.

Medialon Manager was used as the control system for the entire system and the interface for incoming audio timecode and lighting DMX that provided cues for various sections of the show.

CT’s system also employed multiple channels of Barco Encore to provide a source dimming facility, so the lighting department could dim the screen when required. This was done using DMX and Medialon to convert DMX in to Barco protocol. A Vista Spyder 12x4 system was also used as multi source DVI preview. The entire system was fully redundant, with immediate switchover in the event of a component failure.

A more compact version of the system was used for the Closing Ceremony in Beijing on August 24th. Two playback channels provided content for the existing legacy LED screens in the Stadium.

On the same day in London, four 5x4 panel Lighthouse R7-ER screens were situated on The Mall, with an additional two 5x4 panel Mitsubishi OD10 screens, one sited on Constitution Hill, the other at the Queen Victoria Monument in front of Buckingham Palace, for the London 2012 Party on the Mall to mark the moment the Games were officially handed over from Beijing to London.

Throughout August and September, Creative Technology Group also supplied specialist audiovisual services for a host of Olympics related events across Beijing, including the Adidas, Coca Cola, and Samsung Pavilions on the Olympic Green, as well as London House and Swiss House in other areas of the city.

At London House, 72 panels of Barco’s new NX-4 4mm blackface LED and full technical support were supplied for David Grant Special Events, the producers working on behalf of the London Development Agency.

Working with longstanding client, Imagination, CT London supplied 20m2 of Barco OLite 612 LED screen for the Samsung Pavilion. The screen went straight from the All England Lawn Tennis Championships at Wimbledon, where it had been used for the new style scoreboards on Centre Court and No. 1 Court. It was dismantled at the end of the tournament and within a week was shipped, installed and working in Beijing.

Next door in the Adidas and Coca Cola Pavilions, CT US worked with global integrated marketing agency Momentum, to provide complete audiovisual experiences for Olympics fans.

In the Adidas Pavilion, visitors were taken through a journey demonstrating Adidas’s commitment to the Games. The most spectacular feature and grand finale of the area was the Spiral Theatre, comprising nearly 800 tiles of Barco i6XP making up an LED wall spiralling up from ground level, with a diameter of, and rising to a height of, approximately nine metres. Content playback was via nine channels of Grass Valley Turbo Playback triggered via GPI, with an additional channel sending timecode to the audio system for synchronous audio playback with the video in multiple zones throughout the booth.

Meanwhile, the Coca Cola Pavilion- the largest Pavilion on the Olympic Green – was designed to provide a theme park experience, with guests walking through various areas including a display of Coca Cola’s heritage and the Red Passion Theatre, where the story of China’s quest to host the Olympics was shown.

Around 125 loudspeakers were situated around the building, with nine BSS Soundweb BLU-80 and four BLU-10 audio processing remote units sending over 60 distinct audio tracks throughout the building.

In the Red Passion Theatre a 2.3m x 12m Stewart screen, with four Panasonic 7700 projectors and four Watchout units, also controlling a 7.1 surround sound system, created an immersive theatre experience.

Charlie Whittock, Managing Director, Creative Technology Asia Pacific, comments: “Being asked by BOCOG to be part of the Opening Ceremony was a great honour for us, and I am immensely proud of the team from Shanghai and London that worked so hard to deliver what was, in many respects, a very complex project.”

“Beyond the Games, Beijing 2008 represents CT’s ability to truly deliver on a global level. CT teams from China, the UK, and the US have worked closely together to deliver projects for diverse clients around the world on time, on budget, and in unique and complex circumstances.

“Beijing 2008 also signifies CT’s very real presence in Asia as a resource for live event producers.”