The 46th biennial Tokyo Motor Show drew 1.3 million visitors in October unveiling many new vehicles and concept cars to eager crowds. The Toyota booth engaged guests with a giant LED canvas, interactive elements and live-gaming racing with help from disguise vx 4 media servers supplied by Hibino, a disguise Rental Partner.

“The booth’s main display was a seamless 77.4 meters long and 24,768 pixels wide LED wall” says Emu Hino, Technical Director. “The Future City CG on the main display, which served as the background for the entire booth, was immersive and exciting. The experience of being surrounded by it and interacting with various content in the booth was very special for visitors.”

Hino explains that, “the pixel width of the display was never shown before, and 6x 4K outputs for perfect pixel management and synchronisation was required. Instead of the conventional 8-bit 256 colours we also needed 10-bit 1,024 colours. So, this was a project where there was no compromise in terms of scale and image quality.”

David Morris has joined FOR-A as its western regional sales manager. The industry veteran will lead sales efforts across more than a dozen U.S. states, including Alaska and Hawaii, as well as Western Canada.

Polar Graphics, a UK leading distributor for the broadcast, post and pro-AV industries, has taken a stand with one of its longest serving partners Bluefish444 for ISE, taking place at the Amsterdam RAI from 11-14 February 2020.

Bluefish444 is a manufacturer of the professional video industry’s highest-quality uncompressed 4K SDI, ASI, Video Over IP & HDMI I/O cards. Bluefish444 also offers IngeSTore Server, a recording appliance supporting SDI, HDMI, NDI, RTP/RTSP and SMPTE IP capture, suitable for any live production workflow in the AV market.

Polar Graphics Managing Director Peter Rowsell said, “Although I have been personally visiting ISE for a dozen years, 2020 will mark our first participation as a co-exhibitor. It will be an excellent opportunity to further expand our business and that of our valued partners.

“We represent a range of products that are ideal for the AV market, and as the world’s largest pro-AV show, ISE is the ideal venue to discuss our entire product range while featuring one of our most relevant product partners.”

Alongside a focus on Bluefish444, Polar Graphics representatives will be on hand for discussions on other brands represented: Apantac, Cinedeck; Imagine Products; MagStor; Mediaproxy; Stardom; StorageDNA; and Studio Network Solutions (SNS).

MaryTV, a lay apostolate that produces a full-time OTT television channel broadcasting Masses, prayers, rosaries, adorations, press conferences and other events on a daily basis, has integrated Medialooks Video Transport into the channel’s workflow. Medialooks is a specialist provider of ground-breaking video transport streaming solutions known for high-quality and low-latency remote production, ability to work seamlessly and reliably over the public Internet without any dedicated infrastructure, and its ability to integrate easily with SDI or NDI-based workflows.

MaryTV, established in 2010, operates a professional 400 square meters studio adjacent to the St. James Church in Medjugorje, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The 24/7 channel plays pre-recorded content 18 hours per day with the remaining airtime streamed live from Medjugorje. Programming is available on their web site, via Apple TV, iOS and Android and reaches thousands of people every day. An additional remote stream of a daily Rosary is led by the MaryTV founders and originates from Notre Dame, Indiana.

The channel is using Medialooks Video Transport to successfully deliver the final studio mixdown from Medjugorje to a studio in the U.S., where it is published as NDI® and automatically picked up by XPlayout—a Medialooks-based product from Axel Technology. From there the stream is contributed to a CDN and distributed to a global audience.

Broadpeak®, a leading provider of content delivery network (CDN) and video streaming solutions for content providers and pay-TV operators worldwide, today announced that Partner Communications Company (NASDAQ and TASE: PTNR), a leading provider of telecommunications services in Israel, will deploy its server-side ad insertion (SSAI) solution. Integrating Broadpeak's SSAI solution with other Broadpeak technologies already deployed, including origin server, CDN, and cloud PVR, will enable Partner Communications to deliver personalized ads within VOD content, helping it to better monetize its cutting-edge OTT television service.

"We chose Broadpeak's server-side ad insertion solution because it is flexible and simple to integrate with other ecosystem equipment, eliminating the need to perform complex ad insertion at the video level," said Ronen Gutmanovitz, head of TV technologies at Partner Communications.

The operator will use Google Ad Manager, iFeelSmart for the client application, and Broadpeak's solutions for manifest manipulation. Broadpeak's ad insertion solution allows Partner Communications to personalize ads. Broadpeak's SSAI solution avoids rebuffering during ads and defeats ad blockers, ensuring a superior television experience for end users. In addition, iFeelSmart has integrated Broadpeak SmartLib, which enables avoiding ad skipping and provides client-side analytics information. Broadpeak's BkA100 video delivery analytics system then displays this information, combining it with server feedback, in order to provide decision makers with a comprehensive view of the entire system.

In August 2019, MTV hosted its 36th Annual Video Music Awards at the Prudential Center in Newark, USA. The awards saw performances from some of the biggest names in the modern music including Taylor Swift, Shawn Mendes, Missy Elliot, and Miley Cyrus to name but a few. Broadcast globally, the show saw an audience of over 1.5million tune in to watch the show.

The show featured an eye-popping array of video elements throughout the show with used during performances and for stage design and text listings of performers and presenters. Entertainment design firm Visual Noise Creative LLC deployed ten disguise gx 2 media servers to facilitate the video intensive environment.

Jesse Ignjatovic, Co-Founder of the live entertainment production company Den of Thieves, executive produced this year’s show and helped spearhead the use of impressive visuals for the VMAs.

“MTV and Viacom continues to push the limits on television production year over year, and for us that means new scenery with massive amounts of integrated video,” says Trevor Burk, Creative Director and Screens Producer at Visual Noise Creative. “The set that Julio Himede designed this year was no exception and was almost entirely made of video. We needed a platform that enabled us to be creative, flexible and fast enough to get this monster of a show on its feet in a short amount of time.”

MIRRAD supplies two Avolites consoles for Ben Everett’s design for producer, songwriter and performer’s headlining tour

A lot has happened in Maggie Rogers’ world since 2016, when a video of her demoing a then-newly-recorded song, “Alaska,” for Pharrell Williams at NYU went viral. Following opening slots on major tours with both HAIM and Mumford & Sons last year, Rogers dropped her own major label debut, Heard It in a Past Life, this past January, which charted in the second highest slot of the Billboard 200. Consequently, the artist has spent much of 2019 on the road in support of the album, performing a sold-out fall headline tour in such iconic venues as Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, Berkley’s Greek Theatre, and New York City’s Radio City Music Hall.

The “look and feel” of Rogers’ tour this year has been a collaborative effort between the artist and Lighting Designer Ben Everett, who first started working with her when he lit Rogers’ first-ever show in London two years ago. Having toured with an impressive roster of bands over the past five years—including Bear's Den, The Jesus and Mary Chain, and The Dandy Warhols—Everett is now part of the UK-based MIRRAD team, which has been supplying a pair of Avolites Sapphire Touch lighting control consoles for Rogers’ 2019 worldwide trek.

Everett notes that he’s been using Avolites lighting consoles “pretty much since I started in the live music industry,” he shares. “I was lucky enough to learn on all of the early Titan software, and mainly used the Tiger Touch II and Quartz consoles to begin with. The features that kept me attracted to the desks at first were the ability to quickly create really impressive and intricate effects, and the user-friendly and multi-functional layout of the touchscreens. And while growing with the consoles over the years, the ease of being able to create cue stacks, key frame shapes, and pixel mapping really helps me in my day-to-day programming now.”

Iconic American rock band KISS are currently playing their last ever shows with the ‘End of the Road’ World tour. The band, who’s musical career spans over 40 years, opened the tour in January in Vancouver and will wrap up in Nagoya, Japan at the end of 2019, playing 112 dates in between.

True to the legacy of KISS, the larger-than-life tour is a massive production featuring lasers, floating drum kits, fire, pyrotechnics and more. disguise gx 2 media servers are powering a key part of the large-scale video for the tour, which features 17 LED video pods above the stage that move in and out via automated winches, a massive upstage LED video wall, and two side screens.

“KISS has an incredible visual legacy spanning multiple decades and multiple generations of fans,” says Danny Firpo, CEO of All of it Now. “Both Robert Long and Sooner Routhier from the SRAE team were incredible in their level of knowledge of the band’s catalogue on both a musical and visual level, and they spent days going through footage of the band from 1973 to the present. As a farewell tour, the content serves as a nostalgic retrospective, an environmental backdrop or as a dynamic lighting element while still being modular enough to make changes on the road to account for new songs and new content.”

Danny notes that, “What SRAE wanted to do with this show was use the content as an extension of the band’s stage presence without overshadowing them. This is why IMAG is such an important part of the show – because without all the bells and whistles, the band still puts on a pretty incredible show all by themselves.”

disguise’s gx 2 server was chosen for its Notch integration capabilities, Danny reports. “We’re not using a lot of video outputs for the show, but we have a lot of moments in the show where video needs to respond to audio, video or lighting data. The gx 2 gives us the graphics firepower we need to render some pretty complex 3D environments in real-time. The system was able to render out Notch IMAG effects effortlessly, and the linking of camera feeds to Notch scenes in disguise is simple and intuitive.”

Dutch megastar Marco Borsato recently played a stream of sold out record breaking shows at De Kuip stadium in The Netherlands. The set included a huge scale canvas in the form of a 1,000 square-meter LED screen. To power the impressive visuals needed for this event, Michael Al-Far of MalfMedia and Jo Pauly of Visual Solutions turned to disguise servers to provide the power. Six disguise vx 4 and four disguise gx 2 media servers played key roles in the innovative production driving the video content and facilitating real-time IMAG grading of the live feed and the integration of Notch VFX and multicam AR in the massive main screen graphics.

Marco Borsato consistently has been one of the most successful and biggest grossing artists in the Netherlands in the last twenty years. For the 2019 shows, Marco specifically requested that the starting point for the De Kuip shows would be the level of last year’s Sportpalais concerts where the team first introduced cinematographic content. “As an artist and photographer Marco felt the time had come for him to be involved in every step of this exciting project, so we had creative freedom, but he had the final say. Together with Set and Lighting Designer Carlo Zaenen we created the content book in which we outlined the look and feel of every song.” says MalfMedia founder Michael Al-Far.

“Marco Borsato was adamant that the live feed would be treated to fit better in the cinematographic content,” Michael notes. As a result, MalfMedia approached Lewis Kyle White to apply his vast experience in IMAG grading for live shows on this project.

The outdoor show posed a number of challenges: starting in daylight and transitioning to night; a canvas that was by some measures the largest screen ever used for an arena rock concert; the IMAG live feed embedded into the content and not shown on side screens; and a set list of 37 songs that all needed to have the same standard of quality.

NEP UK, the leading provider of outside broadcasting, fixed rig, remote production and media workflow solutions, reveals that is has played a critical role as key technical partner for a second year for the largescale production of Studio Lambert’s social media reality TV series, The Circle, for Channel 4.

The Circle returned to Channel 4 for its second series this autumn, with NEP UK remaining its’ trusted partner since the show’s inception in 2018, refining its talented team and adapting the equipment used to ensure it can meet the evolving requirements of the huge reality production.

Over 135 cameras cover a total of 18 apartments and breakout rooms, the largest number of cameras NEP has deployed on a single production to date, allowing up to 36 video streams to be recorded simultaneously, and editing is undertaken on an EVS backbone with a 25-minute turnaround. One of NEP’s key workflow innovations, and one that distinguishes it from previous reality show successes for the company, such as its long running support of Big Brother, is the use of 10 mini galleries in the production each using a bespoke NEP camera control platform and router setup Each of these galleries in turn feeds into a Master Gallery which stitches all the elements together.