Scharff Weisberg
recently worked with Corporate Audio Visual to put on an elaborate presentation for the Financial Times Energy Awards Show held at the Waldorf Astoria. The company used WATCHOUT, a scalable software system from Dataton, an ultra-wide screen, seamless projection system, to create a 9.5’ x 32’ wide video image.
The Financial Times Energy Awards Show, this year sponsored by Deloitte & Touche, bestows honors on companies who meet or exceed national energy savings requirements. Awards are given in categories such as Strategic Merger of the Year, and Most Successful Strategy Shift of The Year.
For the show, Scharff Weisberg provided three Digital Projection 15sx projectors aligned side-by-side, to create the 32’ wide image. Using WATCHOUT, Scharff Weisberg could program the projection area as a seamless, continuous image with video and graphics panning the entire screen. Imagery on screen included text and graphics for each award, images of award nominees, and live video of the winners. “Using the wide screen, we were able to have graphics fly across the entire stage. It was really quite dramatic,” commented Scharff Weisberg project manager, Joe Volpe.
In addition to the main screen, Scharff Weisberg hung two Proxima projectors and two 50” Pioneer plasma panels, which were used as relay screens. These screens were fed from a Sony DFS 300 Switching System with Beta Cam, I-Mag camera, and computer sources.
The audio system consisted of Apogee AE-5 loudspeaker and Turbosound delay speakers. A Crest 24-channel mixing board was used to control Sennheiser wireless mics, a 360 System’s hard drive audio player, CD, and Betacam playback.
Scharff Weisberg is one of the first companies to program live events and permanent installations with WATCHOUT. The scalable system allows the creation of large-format shows while maintaining unprecedented image fidelity. Images can span or move among several video projectors and the system automatically applies smooth edge blending to overlapping projection areas, resulting in a seamless image. WATCHOUT maintains the combined resolution of all projectors/monitors in the system, avoiding the pixelization effects often associated with video walls and other large format video and graphics systems. Users can apply transitions to images or image elements (including video), as well as animate them across screen areas.
Scharff Weisberg and Corporate AV have worked together on this and other events in the past three years. This year’s group effort included Scharff Weisberg Inc. as the audio and video vendor, Bestek Staging as the stage and set company and Vari-Lite New York as the lighting vendor. Scharff Weisberg also provided project management. Mark Jordan of Corporate AV commented, “I was very pleased with Scharff Weisberg’s standard of work. They were the best choice of supplier for this event.”
The staging division of Scharff Weisberg Inc. specializes in video wall design, video projection, image magnification, show control, computer data display, and sound. Scharff Weisberg is located at 599 Eleventh Avenue, New York, NY 10036.
For more information about Scharff Weisberg, call 212-582-2345 or check out its web site at:www.swinyc.com
For further information about Dataton and WATCHOUT, check out the Dataton web site at: www.dataton.com