Following on from the success of Unilever’s conference at the ExCeL centre in London earlier this year, Steven Williams at CSP asked Basic Monkey to design and supply video for Unite, the Union’s rule conference at the ACC in Liverpool.

Irene Reed from Frameworks Events produced the event and asked long standing partner CSP to realise the technical requirements.

The video system included 3x Barco FLM R22+ projectors, the best in class, which shone onto an 18m x 4.85m super-widescreen surface. These were driven by our ‘Gorilla’ Catalyst system, which took in feeds from cameras and IML voting.

Three cameras in total were used; two Grass Valley HD channels from Basic Monkey, one with a Canon Super 70 long lens and also a locked off Sony Z7 above stage. These were ably cut by Kevin Watts on a Panasonic HS50.

The remit from Frameworks was very specific for the layout on screen and James was tasked with using Catalyst to make it work. A scrolling news ticker at the top of screen could be slid in and out, displaying dynamically updated text which was remotely input. The current topic information was displayed in a box to the left of screen which again was dynamically updated remotely over a network.

IML handled all the delegate registration and card voting, the results of which could be displayed in place of the camera PiP. When delegates approached the stage to talk, they scanned their smart card at the graphics desk which in turn sent their name, region and sector details to be displayed as a lower third graphic over their camera image.

A second Catalyst machine was used to arrange the above information into a feed that was distributed around the building on relay plasmas, ensuring that delegates knew the current order of business and could see what was going on outside of the auditorium.

This complex signal routing and flow of information again showed the flexibility of the Catalyst system, combined with the ease of programming on the Jands Vista console.