Pete McCrea

It could also be around reliability of the sending and receiving cards and whether they hold their mapping correctly after a power cycle. We’ve had issues with screens that for what ever reason after a power cycle you’ll have to resend the wire map and/or rcfg file, so needing a semi skilled person to get it running again. At that point we’d leave the screen on.

A bit late to the party, but happy to help if needed.

If the people in the relay hall have no visual reference to the main space, you could use a laptop on the remote projector and watch the live stream in the relay space. Obviously there will be the propagation delay through internet, so there will be a reasonable delay. If people can hear singing from the man in room the relay room in might not be workable. Another option could be using NDI on a temporary wired network between the two spaces and using a second laptop to receive the NDI feed from the streaming laptop. As a rental company, on a temporary basis I’d probably tackle it with hdmi out of the streaming laptop, HDMI to SDI conversion ( Decimator Design MD Cross v2 my preferred one as it will scale the HDMI to a chosen set resolution rather than take HDMI and simply spit it out on the SDI feed) then run a length of HD-SDI rated coax between the spaces and convert back to HDMI at receive end.

A separate controller allows you to apply different colour adjustments to different portions of the screen, though in Novastar you can configure multiple screens on the one processor/sender as long as the different batches are on different outputs. Unless the physical led smd packages are from the same batch and bin, then it’s very very very unlikely that you’ll get them to match perfectly. Well enough for some clients - yes. For critical viewing with white backgrounds maybe not. Even slight differences in the other components on the IM’s across different batches will give different images. If you get Nova calibration software and camera then that’ll go a long way to help.

If the two quantities of panels are from exactly the same batch you’ll be in a strong position to get them to match. Physical factors like colour of the led package, shaders, colour bandwidth centre etc go a long way to making it easier. You’ll then have to get round the run times and colour shifts over the two batches which the Nova Batch correction will help with. But it is a slow process. If you can get the camera and software then that makes the process a lot swifter. I’d personally get some or all of the other batch in and see how close you can get before committing.

Oh we joined the club well before it was a cool place to be ;-) SFL have held a share in Production AV since 2010, when one of the original directors sold up. We’d talked for years about fully merging, but never did more than talk and take small steps as we were too busy. Last year was pretty quiet work wise (for some weird reason!) so let us get on and sort things like this.

Unreal is being used very heavily to drive large LED screen backgrounds to film against, often with a roof of LED as well. Placing fixtures in the model that then can be controlled by DMX gives the ability to adjust the way the lighting falls on the subject within the space, allowing you to very accurately light a subject and making it look really real. This enables the DOP to composite the shot in camera, needing little post work to get it looking spot on, where as before, if they'd green screened the shot, everything had to be comp'd in afterwards in post. We've been working hard to get a deliverable solution alongside a team of creatives - that give some images of the smaller setup we delivered in November. Last week we delivered a shoot with a 19m x 4m wall, spine of LED roof and moveable LED walls for a major car manufacturer.

Couple of points in favour of buying panels designed for digital signage - brightness and warranty. Digital signage panels can be bought in higher brightness levels for better visibility in day light conditions. Depending on location this might be useful. In terms of warranty: my wife worked in the Tv and audio department of For the John Lewis Partnership a few years ago. A dead tv was returned under warranty for repair. They manufacturer wouldn’t honour the repair - the log files showed it was powered on and off consistently at the same time every day. Their argument was it was being used in a business. Transpired the credit card used to pay was from an estate agents.... Digital signage displays are designed, and warrantied for more rigourous use (24/7, 16/7), and will be repaired or swapped if they fail. A home TV might not. We have advised clients to be atleast aware of this, as it might be an issue.

I’d suggest trying a couple of corporate AV rental companies. Their kit has likely been sat on the shelves for 10months, so something for 11 projectors for a couple of weeks would be quite appealing.

Run VMix on Amazon Webservices. Completely remote control and allows multiple inputs to the system from a multitude of sources. Effectively replaces your hardware mixer. It can accept a range of inputs via NDI and srt, and running it in the cloud should help mimimise issues related to the control sites internet bandwidth.

Love that they are REIN and SHINE faults - making engineers lives a problem what ever the weather!

Wireless video is typically either compressed or needs high bandwidth, so not ideal. Audio and DMX tend to need lower bandwidth, so it’s easier to make more robust solutions. I would not trust any wireless devices with show critical video feeds. Yes a 3rd or 4th camera feed, but not the main feed to my screen. Personally I’d stick with a bit of copper from A to B, whether that’s CATx with adaptors or SDI. More reliable, easier to trouble shoot and can be sourced fairly easily if there are issues.

We run Production AV out of a warehouse in Cheltenham under Cheltenham Borough Council. We’ve been awarded the rates holiday and £25k grant as we sit in the £15k -£50k rates value band. Did take a letter alongside the forms they required. We made it clear on the number of leisure events that we are a key part of the supply chain for, and also how any manner of the public can rock up to our warehouse and hire kit or buy consumables.

Believe they wanted evidence for a meeting Monday 30th.

Acre Jean in London?

The other important thing to consider is where you can cross rent more of the same product, but ideally the same batch. You will need to cross hire more of the product to deliver larger jobs, so who will buy a the same time as you do? The manufacturers can be a PITA changing the spec slightly so that even though they may be the same model, and possibly a matter of days apart of the production line, they will look different to your batch - things like the shader colour or design and the RGB values. So if you can find a partner to both buy from the same batch, then when you need to deliver a screen which incorporates the two owners panels they will look identical. Yes you can calibrate them to a certain extent, but it can be hard to get them spot on. If you're going for a product for outdoor use, then you might find that 4500cdm2 doesn't quite cut it. We have a 6000cdm2 product and there are times when the sun can wash that out. But it depends on your intended uses.

You are right that the 660's won't scale - but then they never make any claims to, so who ever specified the system didn't do it correctly, or didn't understand the equipment they were specifying. I would think Novastar make products for different segments. We don't use the Nova sender/scalers - they are slow (adding latency) and the quality isn't as good as Barco or other high end scalers. But then I know of other companies that use the VX series with the built in scalers.

Would it not work to give TVOne a call and order a replacement?

Get in touch with Liteup in Fareham just up from Portsmouth. They provide lighting, sound and rigging to a lot of large events and are growing. Be up front with them in that you want to learn more about the industry and they might have an opportunity for you to start helping out and learning about the industry. Once you’ve done a few crazy shifts on jobs you’ll either love it or hate it as Kerry said...

We got a bag of over 100 shells foc from Neutrik not long after we purchased our outdoor led screen. The latches parted company with the shells all to easily, so Neutrik replaces them. Thankfully using a reputable screen manufacturer made it easy as Neutrik could see they were genuine.

Getting the O Licence isn’t that hard, certainly for a restricted. We’ve held one for about 7 years now with little to no issue. Find a friendly local truck hire company and open an account - access to vehicles sorted. Likewise find a nearby HGV Garage and ask at the service desk about getting setup. Our nearby DAF dealership have a template letter saying they’ll undertake servicing to the required levels, which went in the application. Local news appears are used to O Licence submissions, so again give them a call and they help out. In terms of carrying your own goods - when I spoke with a DVSA rep on the new license holders training (which was scary for the lack of regard some of the operators there had, mainly those in construction), they said that carrying sub hired kit along with yours to your job wasn’t an issue. As for drivers hours, drivers CPC etc - well that’s a whole can of worms!

Now that's a comprehensive response!

In full agreement that this is a tragedy. As others here and elsewhere have said, we don't go to work to die. The Civil Engineer in me is interested in what caused this accident. It's a completely different type of structure to those involved in other recent events (and seldom seen in the UK), and sounds like weather was not a causal factor, so there's something else going on there. I await the official reports with interest.

I'm 99% certain that the Stonewood Audio SA-CMS2 Base station has a switch to allow selection of the channel that the Aux input goes to. Spec Sheet here...