Emaar NYE 2019 at Burj Khalifa

SACO Technologies was tasked with designing a permanently mounted system capable of delivering high-resolution video capabilities. They selected the disguise production toolkit integrated with SACO’s own systems to power the LED screen running the length of the world’s tallest building.

Burj Khalifa, developed and owned by Emaar Properties Dubai, rises 2,722 feet and 163 stories to pierce the desert skyline. It teamed with SACO on an initiative to light up the skyscraper’s east façade and provide high-resolution video capabilities for what became the ‘Light Up 2018’ New Year’s celebration. The groundbreaking show, viewed by more than one million people on site, earned a Guinness World Record for the largest laser light and sound show on a single building.

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For the ‘Emaar NYE 2019’ show, the scope was even more ambitious. The production extended through to March 2019 and set two more Guinness World Records: the largest LED-illuminated façade, and the tallest LED-illuminated façade. The project required replacing the existing temporary system with a permanently mounted system consisting of the latest in LED technology, video processing and disguise pro range servers. German-based disguise studio and rental partner bright! studios were responsible for designing the NYE show, and the resulting three-month extension, handling the animation work and the shows creative direction.

The SACO solution, which utilised its innovative V-Stick technology, has 20 times more resolution than the previous system and extends virtually the entire height. It comprises more than 17 miles of V-Stick LED video/light fixtures and boasts 1,139,144 RGB pixels, mapped and powered by disguise.

SACO chose a disguise 2x4pro’s to drive the complex media display. “We’ve been working with disguise since the beginning and have developed an interesting workflow between our two companies,” says Jonathan Labbee, Executive Vice-President & COO with SACO. “SACO has also developed a processor mapping tool, which directly uploads coordinates to the disguise unit. To help bring the integration to the next level, SACO also collaborated with dandelion + burdock, a disguise studio partner, who specialises in custom disguise solutions and developed a workflow and devised content for the project.

“Saco's integration was meticulously planned out, and we managed to deliver an extreme 29628 vertical pixels,” explains Nils Porrmann, Director at dandelion + burdock. “The size only becomes clear at the site itself. With the bottom-most pixel at 210 feet from the ground, even extremely long photographic lenses would only give us a moderate resolution to debug the installation and verify each pixel.

To handle the large-scale project SACO needed to “maximize the video processor raster” and ensure that the show control component was designed around the SACO and disguise systems. “The functions and features of disguise that were particularly helpful were 3D mapping tool and live input capability. The ability of the software and hardware to manage very large video files was very helpful, too,” Jonathan explains.

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Six custom multimedia shows were created by SACO as part of the daily content. It was important that the visual content related to the Burj and its architecture, impressing visitors by presenting visual effects to trick the eye and enable the architecture to take on a ‘second skin.’

“For the actual content production pipeline, two different templates were created in Adobe After Effects to allow content to fit perfectly our system specifications, SACO’s technology and the building architecture,” explains Marie-Christine Dufort, Creative Director with SACO Media Collective. “Despite the building’s height and the accurate pixel count was enormous, the templates were easy to use and helped create any type of content very efficiently.