The Tony’s Awards celebrate the best of theatre performance with an annual live
broadcast television show from the Beacon Theatre in New York City. Viewed by
millions, the show combines live performed excerpts from popular Broadway shows
with the pomp and circumstance of a red-carpet award ceremony.
Throughout the ceremony, the show transitions from Broadway set to awards
presentation in moments. Historically, the show has made extensive use of video to
aid with these rapid set changes. This year, the set featured high resolution 3.4mm
LED video walls arranged much as a theatre set would be. A large “cyclorama’ video
wall ran along the back of the stage, vertical tabs at the sides of stage replaced
curtains and a large moving “close down’ LED screen flew in to further change the
look.
Driving all of these video walls were four Hippotizer V4 Taiga media servers
supplied by VER. The servers, programmed and operated by Peter Acken from a
GrandMA2 lighting console composited a mixture of still images and videos supplied
by the13thstudios. As is common on large live events, a parallel backup system of
four additional Taigas mirrored the primary system for instant failover if required.
The Tony’s present a unique set of challenges, not least that the show is comprised
of 15 experts from Broadway shows. Each of these “mini shows’ program and
rehearse in the days before broadcast. With very little time to program on site,
Acken pre-programmed as much as possible in VER’s New York offices using
Hippotizer’s built in Visualiser. A single Taiga running Visualiser was used to display
ten outputs and 160 media layers onto the 3D model in real time, helping Acken and
the creative team to program much of the show before even arriving in the theatre.
On Site, the Visualiser remained critical as a way to preview changes without
disrupting ongoing rehearsals.
Another challenge was with media management; new media is constantly being
delivered to the theatre throughout rehearsals. This new media needed to be
imported into Hippotizer as quickly as possible, often while rehearsing a different
part of the show. V4 offered Acken several ways to speed up the media workflow.
Working with the content creators, all videos were created using the HAP family of
codecs. This popular codec combines good visual quality with unmatched playback
speed making it ideal for live events. HAP codecs can be created in many popular
video editing programs on both PC and Mac based rendering systems. Hippotizer V4
can play HAP files without transcoding them, vastly reducing the time from content
render to playback onto screen.
To further speed up the content pipeline, all new content was placed into a
Watchfolder, where Hippotizer automatically uploaded the media from a network
drive. Each piece of content contained its media map position as part of its name,
enabling Hippotizer to automatically place each of the hundreds of clips into the
correct location. Then, using a 10Gb network, the media was automatically
distributed to all Hippotizers through HippoNet. This automated ingest, update,
distribute workflow meant that dozens of changes to many pieces of media across
many scenes could be done instantly and without any change to the show
programming.
Show operation was handled from a GrandMA 2 Lighting console; Acken’s desk of
choice.
