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.

Ariana Grande’s Sweetener World Tour is underway with disguise 4x4pro media servers and OmniCal projector-calibration engine playing a key role in facilitating the ethereal, galaxy-themed visuals on stage.

The tour supports the artist’s fourth and fifth studio albums, ‘sweetener’ and ‘thank u, next.’ It kicked off in March 2019 in New York and wraps in December 2019 in California, comprising three legs and a total of 102 dates in North America and Europe.

“The tour was designed to highlight the range and femininity of Ariana and create an ever-transforming space for her to perform her latest albums and give the audience an immersive experience to dive into as they witness Ariana's journey through her music,” says Loren Barton, Media Department Director with Lumentech. He has overseen the projection and media departments in support of many recent projects by Production and Lighting Designer LeRoy Bennett. Possible Productions produced the motion graphics for the show, which sees the stage brought to life with visuals of space during the song ‘NASA’, the visuals then turn the stage into a planet, a moon and a galaxy. From conversations with Ariana herself, Michael Figge and his team at Possible created a stage theme for each song that reinforced the choreography and lighting.

NDI®, a brand of Vizrt Group, today released the 4th generation of NDI technology to both developers and end users at IBC2019 in Amsterdam. Using software, computers and networks, NDI is a crucial part of the organization’s mission of making software-defined visual storytelling (#SDVS) accessible to everyone via the universal power of IP-based video. NDI is the dominant IP standard for digital media by using standard Ethernet networks and mobile environments. NDI changes the picture by giving everyone access to easy-to-use, high-quality video and audio over IP. NDI is royalty free to use software with hundreds of developers making thousands of NDI-enabled products now in the hands of millions of customers around the world.

Esports Championship Series (ECS) Season 7, the latest iteration of the world’s most-watched CS:GO (Counter-Strike: Global Offensive) tournament, took place earlier this year, culminating in a four-day final in June at The SSE Arena, Wembley, London. The 16 groups that started the event were gradually reduced to four teams, which then battled through a knock-out competition to determine the season’s champions.

Dave, the young English rapper, singer/songwriter and record producer, has begun his ‘Psychodrama’ World tour in support of his eponymous debut album released earlier this year. The show features a disguise solo media server driving dynamic video content by TAWBOX on the stage.