The eyes ‘eyeing’ one of the first corporate events to use High End Systems’ DL.3 belonged to the attendees of The American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery’s 2008 Symposium & Congress that recently met in Chicago.
Production supplier and lighting designer Dale Sahlin of Fusion Design Live in Las Vegas specified 8 DL.3 digital light fixtures and 2 Road Hog Full Boar consoles for the event’s show producer Audio Visual Management Group (AVMG) of Dallas. Intelligent Lighting Creations of Arlington Heights, Ill., supplied the equipment.
Says Sahlin, “We were fortunate to use DL.2s with AVMG over the last year on numerous shows and they trust High End’s digital lighting products that we provide. When we talked about this show, they were excited to be the first to use the DL.3s on show site.”
Four DL.3s on the downstage truss lit the ceiling, walls, and on-stage 20-foot round columns. The other 4 DL.3s were set up backstage on scaffolding towers to project onto two 17x40 widescreens.
“The ceiling over the crowd provided a great virtual canvas to shoot the DL.3s on as well as large white boxes over the doorways to shoot onto," Sahlin explains. "The client was so impressed with the brightness of the widescreens that we mainly used the DL.3s as projection on those screens. Originally I planned to do rear-screen projection for graphics and IMAG. We used the DL.3s on the whole screen and I made a masked box in black on the second graphics layer and then they used their conventional projector to shoot IMAG in the PIP box.”
Sahlin adds, “I have been using DL.2s for the two years and now with the extra 1000 lumens and SDI input/output options on the DL.3 it just keeps getting better and better. Our clients are now having us spec complete shows with just DL.3s on them for projection and with the media server built onboard it gives us all the options needed to accomplish that without all the video switching systems.”
This was Sahlin’s first time to use the new Road Hog Full Boar console, although he's an experienced programmer on other Wholehog products. “I onlyprogram on Hogs and will continue to do so," he says.
Jim Holt, AVMG president and show producer, says that the DL.3 allowed them to be flexible in their show design and production. “The flexibility of DL.3 allowed us to change the look of each session with a touch of a button,” he explains. “The richness of color generated by the DL.3s almost overshadowed the video projectors on the show. Its collage and masking features are amazing and we were able to project onto a widescreen and have many features that would need a large video switching system like PIP windows. Due to the large size of our client’s general sessions, typically 3,000 people or more, the DL.3s have allowed us to provide the wow factor to the live event, without the wow factor to the budget.”