Electrosonic MS9200P HD players are a key component in the innovative content delivery system designed by David Niles of Niles Creative Group to source the spectacular “Comcast Experience” LED display in the lobby of Philadelphia's new Comcast Center.
The mammoth LED wall measures 83.3 feet wide and 25.4 feet high with rectangular cutouts for the lobby's three banks of elevators. Sporting 10 million pixels in a seamless flat array, the LED wall delivers an extremely high degree of photorealism at five times the resolution of HDTV.
Known for playback of High Definition digital video in the most demanding and captivating presentation environments, the MS9200P meets its match in the “Comcast Experience” where the world's largest 4mm LED wall displays 10 million pixels of ever-changing content. Commissioned by developer Liberty Property Trust for the dramatic public plaza in the city's newest office tower, the unique installation fuses art and technology as it blends with the architecture of the seven-story glass atrium.
David Niles, president of New York City's Niles Creative Group and executive producer and designer of the “Comcast Experience,” selected 16 MS9200P HD players for the complex content delivery system he engineered. “I had lots of equipment choices, but I was impressed by the MS9200s' field-tested reliability and performance,” he says. “We have an enormous amount of content running 18 hours a day. The Electrosonic HD players are genlockable and run without flaw. The players' price point also enables us to have hot spares and backups with content already loaded so it will be easy to swap them out as time passes.”
Shooting with HD, RED One and Phantom high-speed HD cameras, Niles Creative Group produced all the high-resolution content for the “Comcast Experience” -- landscapes and scenics, dance sequences, giant clock gears -- which create amazing visual illusions for some 10,000 people in transit daily in the building's lobby. At times the content even mimics the atrium's wood paneling and virtually disappears.
“The average visit to the lobby is 20-30 seconds so we wanted people to see something new and different all the time,” says Niles. To achieve this, he designed a groundbreaking, totally unmanned, automated content delivery system which both plays out fully-finished HD video clips and composes its own clips, “like Lego block assemblies,” with thousands of possible permutations.
“I wrote special algorithms and artificial intelligence to bring together families of scenarios and play out different content on a fairly regular basis,” he explains. “No one is onsite operating the system, it runs completely unattended.”
The content delivery system features eight Dataton WATCHOUT servers six of which play back at any given time to the six segments of the wall comprised of 6,771 Barco LED modules. Ten MS9200P HD players, which Niles customized with dual drives, source the HD video content and feed a Barco Encore system routing images to the wall. Six additional MS9200Ps play out some scenarios and serve as stand-by and backup systems. Medialon show control orchestrates the installation.
“We have 17 racks of equipment,” notes Niles. “We built the content delivery system in New York and brought it online six weeks before we delivered it to Philadelphia” where it is housed in Comcast Center's LED room. “The 9200s' user interface is very simple, and the interface between the HD players and the Medialon programming computer is very simple,” he reports.
Electrosonic's MS9200P is a feature-rich HD player ideal for innovative, attention-getting video displays. It boasts HD-SDI digital output, genlock input for multi-channel and 3D systems, edge-blending capabilities, and robust design. Input can be scaled to match the size of non-standard display panels served by the projector.
Jennifer Wisehart was Electrosonic's salesperson for the project. At Niles Creative Group John Dietrich codirected the content with David Niles and choreographed the dance sequences. Emmora Irwin was the producer with Alan Anderson programming Medialon show control and Bill Lyon programming WATCHOUT.
About Electrosonic
Electrosonic is a worldwide audio-visual company that operates in three ways: as a systems integrator, as a product manufacturer, and as a provider of AV facilities management and contract servicing. Founded in 1964, Electrosonic has always been among the first to apply new technology to create tailored, state-of-the-art solutions that meet the challenges of the professional audiovisual markets. Electrosonic excels at creating unique products for large screen image processing, digital media networks, and high definition image playback solutions From creating the 9400, the world's first HD digital media appliance, to our new 9600 - designed for high performance JPEG playback with up to 2K file support - Electrosonic is acknowledged as the leading innovator in HD media playback; delivering complete, competitively-priced turnkey solutions with remote management, content distribution and the crisp, distinct imagery that only true HD offers.