Vista Survives Immersion

Vivid Sydney is a festival of light, music and ideas that includes large-scale light installations and projections through to music performances and the holding of conferences and seminars on ideas and creativity. First held in 2009, Vivid Sydney has become Sydney’s major winter festival which lights up different parts of the city after 6pm, including the Sydney Opera House, Circular Quay and The Rocks.

From light “graffiti” on the Museum of Contemporary Art to live fire shows, more than 200,000 visitors experienced the festival this year.

One of the most popular of the light sculptures that were part of the Festival was Immersion designed by Martin Bevz and Kathryn Clifton. Consisting of LED tubes in a semi-circle, the sculpture invited the viewer to ’play‘ with them by reflecting their movement through the installation via a live video relay of still and dynamic images. The tubes are pixel mapped to form what is essentially a very low-res 18 x 2m video screen.

Martin used the Jands Vista M1 to control the Catalyst media server for a number of reasons including its size.

“Not requiring a full sized console to fit in a 12RU rack for three weeks – three very wet weeks – was a major plus!” he said. “Also, having physical faders allowed for easy programming and playback testing. The Jands Vista M1 works on a Mac alongside the Catalyst software and that reduces hardware requirements. I really like the visual timeline based playback and the easy to use date/time events so an operator was not required to power up and down each day.”

Martin further commented that the Vista was rock solid throughout the duration of the festival and consequently it‘s the console that he would always prefer for any semi permanent installations.

“It‘s visual, easy to use and Jands have a great support network,” he added. “As a final touch to the installation we programmed a start up sequence featuring a countdown timer and static which slotted in with the rest of the programming. It‘s important to be able to work visually with media servers as they are inherently visual instruments – you need to be able to ’see‘ what the desk is telling the server in order to enable seamless crossfades and visual effects.”

Unfortunately Martin does not have any photographs of the rack as his phone didn‘t survive the rain as well as the Vista did!