The Olivier Awards celebrated its 50th anniversary, relying on Brompton’s Tessera LED processing platform and Absen Saturn panels to bring cinematographic spectacle to the event at London’s Royal Albert Hall.
Blue-i Theatre Technolology specified an LED rig that was split into seven pieces with a central 16:9 screen which flew in and out throughout the ceremony to display VT packages and scenic content behind performers, while another six screens were built into the scenery as ‘posters’ which were used for both scenic content and imagery celebrating nominated and winning productions.
The setup comprised two Tessera 4K SX40 LED processors and two Tessera XD 10G data distribution units for the main flown screen, with a matching configuration of two additional SX40s and two XDs powering the poster screens.
Absen Saturn 2.6mm panels were chosen specifically to run on Brompton processing, bringing reduced weight to the setup which benefited the automation and rigging teams working at the Royal Albert Hall.
Sam Jeffs, head of technical theatre, Blue-i, commented: “Being a live broadcast, project timings are really tight, so ensuring we could load in quickly and have a rock solid system with full redundancy was very important. The SX40 and XD combination allowed for multiple layers of redundancy, which makes it one of our favourite Brompton features.”
Ultra-low latency was a critical requirement for the live camera feeds during the show’s broadcast, reducing end-to-end latency to just one frame across the processor. This was mission critical as the production signal had to pass through an outside broadcast system.
Genlock supported the broadcast pipeline, allowing the entire LED system to be synchronised to the production’s house sync, eliminating any risk of on-camera artefacts during the live transmission.