This week James has been at the NEC in Birmingham for the Gadget Show Live with our own Catalyst and Jands Vista combination.

XL Video are providing two Chromatek 6mm screens which are integrated into the wings of the set, into which will be fed a combination of live video, directed by Kevin Watts, and VT playback originating from Catalyst.

In previous years XL have used Doremi hard drive playback devices, however due to content arriving on site from a variety of sources including advertisers, it was decided that using a media server with an operator would be the best solution.

Despite Catalyst’s ability to play almost any file format, James converted all files to the Apple Intermediate Codec, well proven for efficient live playback in Catalyst. To best achieve this Tim Riley from XL Video asked Basic Monkey to provide their own media server, complete with it’s suite of video and graphics tools.

The show went without major hitch, bar a few moments requiring some ad-lib when the flying scenes didn’t go quite to plan leaving Suzi Perry suspended!