Disguise has explained its role in enabling Eurovision Song Contest 2024 to become the first large-scale live broadcast to achieve a full SMPTE 2110 workflow from the media server to LED screens.
Five moveable LED cubes were suspended above the stage along with separate LED backwalls. Disguise fed the ST 2110 video outputs to the Panasonic Kairos, which was used as a multiviewer, said the company. Video output was then sent to the Megapixel Helios LED processor, with its recently released 100Gb input module able to output to 1,000 square metres of ROE Visual LED. Arista switches handled network distribution with Brainstorm managing synchronisation.
Lighting and screen content was designed by Green Wall Designs and Disguise drove video playback across the stage, said the company.
Some 2,168 lighting fixtures, each with their own LED or laser light source, were imported into Disguise’s Designer software, then pixel mapped with the content output to LED strips and lighting fixtures across 900 DMX universes.
Working with Creative Technology Sweden, official event supplier, Disguise delivered a system with eight Disguise GX 3 machines (one Director, three actor and four understudy machines), each equipped with 16 IP-VFC cards. Redundancy was provided with a split across red and blue separate networks and IP-VFC supported SMPTE 2022-7 seamless protection switching.
Disguise’s VFC technology enables users to swap outputs with minimal latency from a Disguise server to whichever format is required by production, and ensures video latency is kept to a minimum within the video system. The company also provided on-site support during pre-production and production.
Peter Kirkup, solutions and innovation director at Disguise, said, “We have had the pleasure and privilege of working on the Eurovision Song Contest for six years, and every year tops the last in terms of scale, technical ingenuity and, above all, spectacle. The creativity and technical talent required to successfully mount such a large-scale broadcast event is incredible. We are very proud of our partnership with the EBU and Creative Technology and can only imagine what we will achieve together in the future.”
