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Medialon is providing show control
software and hardware to the high-profile Victory Media
Network®, the world’s first large-scale, outdoor digital
arts gallery located in Victory Park, Dallas.
Medialon acts as the core control for the massive system
at Victory Media Network (VMN), which opened March 23 in
a new downtown development centered around the American
Airlines Center. VMN offers visitors an interactive mix
of advertising, education, entertainment and art and
provides brand advertisers with an opportunity to create
unprecedented immersive environments and captivating
experiences. More than 17 million visitors annually are
expected at Victory Park.
Medialon supplied Manager software and a pair of
Medialon Audio Servers to control the video content,
audio, screen movement, and lighting and water effects
for content displayed on two fixed 20x20-foot tower
displays, a 19x32-foot digital portal display, and eight
movable 15x26-foot LED walls installed in two four-panel
groups facing each other across the 60-foot wide Victory
Plaza. The movable media displays are mounted on rails,
and stacked two-on-two. The motion of the panels can be
choreographed individually, or they can be locked
together to form 30x52-foot HD screens with 16:9 aspect
ratios.
“VMN represents a new type of show, an architectural
show,” notes Medialon CEO Alex Carru. “We’re seeing
more and more architectural applications used with show
control software to create special effects, not just
playback. Medialon Manager links to the VMN database
and synchronizes all the devices. We create one big
show from an assemblage of different small shows.
Manager’s unique capabilities read information in the
database, make calculations and create the show
dynamically from information retrieved from the database.
Shows are not preprogrammed on the timeline, they’re
dynamically controlled.”
Medialon Manager has several
unique features which made it an ideal choice for the
VMN application. It is one of the only show-control
software programs to embed both linear and logical
programming, the latter enabling users to deal with
unpredictable situations that often occur in live shows.
The ability to use a variable as a parameter in a
command cue also gives Medialon Manager incredible power
to show-control programming; the cue remains the same
but the value sent depends on another process. In
addition, IP is natively supported by Medialon Manager
and, key for VMN, no other control software offers such
easy integration with standard databases.
While Medialon Manager provides
show control VMN’s scheduling system is an ASP.NET
application with an MS SQL server on the back end.
“When you turn on Manager it pulls all the information
it needs from the database; the chain of processes is
very complex,” emphasizes Medialon's Alan Anderson, who
assisted Show & Tell Production’s senior software
engineer Josh Silverman with programming. Show & Tell
was hired to design a content management, scheduling and
playback system for VMN.
“One or multiple video files are synchronized to the
screen movements and a whole sequence of events which
are taking place,” says Anderson. “All this information
is read continuously off the database which is updated
through a web interface developed for this project.”
Assets can consist of art pieces, advertising, broadcast
content and special-event programming.
Show & Tell’s Silverman has frequently used Manager on
projects. “I don’t know of a similar product with the
flexibility and power to control all the devices in the
system,” he says.
“Manager reads the scheduling information from our
database, including synchronized playlists of video
assets, audio assets, lighting cues, motion cues, and
special hardware control cues. Sometimes, assets and
cues are scheduled to run in sync with each other and
sometimes they are not,” Silverman explains. “Manager
takes this scheduling information and choreographs the
behavior of the subsystems to execute the schedule. It
also logs activity back to the database so that reports
can be created to detail what video content played at
what time and on which screens.”
He continues, “To see and hear the video screens, the
lights and the audio systems each doing their own
independent thing, and then to watch them all come
together for a synchronous show is a really powerful and
unique experience. That this synchronous and
asynchronous behavior can be scheduled so easily in a
web application gives our client an unprecedented amount
of control, but it’s Manager that does the heavy lifting
behind the scenes at show time.”
When VMN launched there were “at least 130 different
video and audio assets in the system,” says Silverman.
“It was important to put together a strict set of rules
to manage so much content so when the time came to
schedule everything it would all fit together correctly.”
He reports that VMN plans to add thousands of new assets
over the next few years.
Equipment list:
6 GV Turbos (2 channels each)
1 64x64 Extron Video Matrix
6 Folsom Image PRO HD
4 Spectrum Quadview XL2
1 Medialon Audio Server
1 Mediamatrix Nion Audio Matrix
1 Hog PC
1 Screen Motion System (Barco Custom Developed)
1 SQL Database
1 Network Attached Storage (1.5 Terabytes)
Opto 22 Contact closures
Several Plasma Video Screens (Barco, Sharp, etc.)
1 Denon DVD Player
1 DVD Recorder
1 Betacam
Whitlock Group was the integrator
for VMN. |
