Thousands of people gathered in Nottingham for a series of public talks and teachings given by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama during his 2008 UK tour. Over 8,000 attended the two days of talks, with more than 5,000 attending the three days of teachings at the multi-purpose Trent FM Arena.
In order to create a sense of intimacy in such a large auditorium QED Productions chose to employ the very latest in large arena video and audio systems. The brightest single phase 3-chip DLP native HD projectors in the world — the 17,500 ANSI lumen Christie Roadster HD18Ks — were the obvious choice to fill the twin 24ft by 13.5ft screens.
Not necessarily so obvious was the decision to use Vista Spyder processors to control the cameras as well as the entire audio-visual system. Two linked Spyder 344 units were assigned to mix five HDSDI cameras plus DVI graphics and VT sources. Spyder outputs were fed via DVI fibre to the HD18K projectors, to Apple Mac Pros at HDSDI and SDI, and at SDI to Sony HVR-1500 recorders.
Mixing cameras on Spyder was made easy by use of a “shotboxâ€, which provides a push-button panel instead of the standard computer-based interface usually employed to control Spyder.