Toulouse, France-based LCD Vision, which specializes in audiovisual installations and video projection, has been producing events for Airbus for 12 years, but staging a customer event earlier this year in Hamburg, Germany was a little different.
Laurent Puget, owner and founder of LCD Vision, says he takes on quite a few events each year for Airbus and notes that his relatively small company can handle events up to 1,000 attendees without hiring subcontractors. “We have been working with Airbus for many years,” he says. “For their symposiums, we are handling between four and eight events all around the world each year. In general, these events bring together between 300 and 600 attendees.”
For the Airbus event, it was Puget’s second time working with the team in charge of the new A350 XWB aircraft program. “For this show, we managed the whole event: projection, filming, audio, structure, and cabling,” he says. While most of the events LCD handles usually use two or three screens and projectors, this presentation required a more elaborate and dynamic production. “We had to do I-Mag and two picture-in-picture [PIP] displays. The first PIP was for the PowerPoint presentation, and the second one was to show each speaker live. The other key element was the ability to broadcast an HD movie during the presentation.”
Puget used Christie Digital Roadster S+16K projectors on a custom 26'x13' screen, with an Analog Way Di-VentiX II Multi Layer Mixer Scaler Seamless Switcher—which he says “offers a great value for the money, allowing us to answer almost all the demands from our customers”— managing the images. I-Mag content was shot with a Sony HVR-Z1E camera, while an HD movie was also broadcast—via a Sony J-30/SDI Betacam player—four times a day for an entrance look. “The monitor feedbacks came through the Di-VentiX,” says Puget. “On the monitors, we were not displaying the entire projection but only the PowerPoint presentation. This is why we had to split the sources. The first flow was sent through the Di-VentiX II for the I-Mag and PIPs, and the other flow was sent through the Di-VentiX for the stage feedbacks. Everything was wired in DVI, while the connection between the Di-VentiX II and the projector was via fiber-optic cable.”
The setup also included four PCs for the Di-VentiX II: a main PC in 4:3 for the presentation and a PC in 16:9 for live content, as well as two for backup that also enabled live modifications even if the audience was present. “The camera was plugged in YUV and the digital Betacam player in SDI,” notes Puget. “The last day of the show, we had another source coming from the stage, a PC dedicated to the debriefing of the event.”
As far as content, Puget and his team worked with the Airbus graphic design department on the background and the PIP, used as the first page of each presentation. “The PIP should blend in with the background,” says Puget. “This was a technical challenge in terms of image geometry and for the setup of colorimetry, contrast, and brightness.”
Puget’s workhorse for the event was the Di-VentiX II setup. “It is now easy to propose a solution including two or three PIPs and live I-Mag to every customer,” says Puget. “Before that, this type of presentation was more dedicated to key account customers. For the show in Hamburg, we had to remove the two PIPs from the live I-Mag and then display in full screen an image coming from the Betacam player. The operating mode to manage these steps is simplified: I make my layers, and when the script gives me the ‘go’ signal, I push the ‘take’ button, and that’s it. I don’t need to go through multiple operations.”