The evolution of Digital Art - Part 3: Lights & Media Servers

The History of Lights

In the good old days, lights were just lights. They could be turned on ond off. Well, it was also possible to control the brightness. Later came different colors of lights, mechanically moved lights (aka moving lights), gobos, and of course also the combination of all. But the major changes concerning lights in the professional lighting industry definitely happened during the last 5 years:

1. The manufacturing prices of videoprojectors decreased, and the light power (ansi lumen) increased. Thus, traditional lights (e..g. in clubs) are more and more replaced by video projectors.
2. LED based output medias became very popular. They are extremely bright, cheap, trendy and even energy friendly.

Controlling complex Setups

In order to control complex setups of lights (up to a few hundret lights!), Lighting Desks were developed. Lighting Desks allow to control every single light out of many, or many lights bundled together. The protocol used to send/receive signals to/from a light is called DMX (if you have never heard about DMX, think about something similar to MIDI). DMX has been designed quite simple in the beginning and has quickly been accepted as a standard in the industry, but it cannot satisfy todays requirements. Thus, today a few DMX variations exist - each of them more or less dirthy hacks or workarounds to overcome some initial DMX restrictions. A new protocol called ACN is currently evaluated and will hopefuly be released and accepted in the industry as a new standard soon.

Media Servers

Because today modern setups of lights often contain video projectors and/or LEDs, there had to be a way to control the content that is displayed on this output medias: e.g. to display pictures or play videos. Obviously, some kind of computers that feed the outputmedias were needed. In the professional lighting industry, this computers are meanwhile simply called 'Media Servers'. They typically receive DMX signals from the Lighting Desk, and based on the signals they will feed the attached output media(s) (e.g. a video projector or a LED wall) with a mix of pictures, videos and/or realtime effects.

The worldwide global players of professional media servers are:

1. Hippotizer (PC, DirectX) from Green Hippo
   
2. Pandoras Box (PC, DirectX) from Coolux
3. Catalyst (Mac, OpenGL) from Highend

Whenever you see a big multimedia spectacle (e.g. live concert from Robbie Williams, or a TV show with lots of video projections and LEDs (e.g. Pop Idol in England, or Deutschland sucht den Superstar in Germany etc.) you can be pretty sure that the video projections and animations on the LEDs are controlled by one of the three above Media Servers.

Catalyst is - according to my personal analysis and knowledge - based on software structures that cannot compete with the Hippotizer or Pandoras Box, but it covers the basic requirements of playing/mixing videos and DMX input processing quite well.

Pandoras Box and the Hippotizer are technically both based on similar Hardware (PC with fast Graphics Adapter) and Software (DirectX based), and both of them offer tons of realtime effects and additional features (e.g. remote control, softedge blending of multiple projectors etc.) besides simple video playback/mixing and DMX processing.
With Pandoras Box Media Vision, Coolux currently concentrates on the development of a solution combining a lighting desk and media server, which makes the handling of small scaled setups very effective.
With the development of 'HippoNet', Green Hippo currently enhances the possibilities of the next generation Hippotizers in a way to create and control the most complex setups, where traditional setups with simple hierarchies of Lighting Desks and Media Servers failed.

More than 20 Hippotizers are used in the currently probably biggest worldwide multimedia spectacle: Cirque du Soleils show 'Love' in the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas. It is a very impressive example for the usage of Media Servers.

Some quotes from online articles about the show:

• http://www.plsn.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1161&Itemid=228

"Large-scale images cascade in sync with the music throughout most of Love, requiring a robust projection rig. The projections are run via a dedicated grandMA console, located in the projection booth, with 20 Green Hippo Hippotizer HD dual-output media servers with custom software doing the digital manipulations, and 20 DPI HIGHlite 12000Dsx projectors in five sets, double stacked on each side of the theatre for extra punch on two 103' wide × 20' curved screens that stretch along the north and south wall of the theatre (the same images are seen on both screens), pumping up to 250,000 lumens of light."

"To create birds that fly in a natural way for “Yesterday,” Laporte used Green Hippo's flocking program that allows the CGI birds to follow a target by using a joystick. This was developed in conjunction with Sean Westgate and the Green Hippo programming team. While Laporte worked on the ideas for various images, his media guru, Luc Lavergne, worked out the technical solutions."

• http://livedesignonline.com/mag/love_need/

"There are 28 Green Hippo Hippotizer media servers all synched together. It borrows technology from video gaming and allows LaPorte to use eight different layers of high-definition images. “I’m able to tweak the color, the contrast, put in some effects—all in real time,” he says. “So where as before I was always going back to the editing room to make changes, now I can follow the rhythm of a creation. If I decide to change the color completely, go to a dual-tone effect or reduce the speed, I can do it all in real-time. For me, it is a big, big step for the creation of a live show."

The following is a photo of the live performance. In the background you see one of the huge curved screens, 40 meters in width.

















And here a photo of the backstage with the Hippotizer rendering farm... :D