Green Hippo

25th Winter Universiade - Erzurum Turkey 27th Jan-06th Feb

25th Winter Universiade - Erzurum Turkey 27th Jan-06th Feb

This year’s Winter Universiade took place in eastern Anatolia’s Erzurum and saw a host of athletes compete for the much sought-after medals. The yearly winter and summer Universiade are international sporting events organised for university athletes and covering a broad spectrum of disciplines.

Taking care of the video and lighting display at its opulent opening ceremony was Istanbul based company Phantom Event Engineering who created an amazing visual spectacle.

The theme of the opening ceremony at Cemal Gursel Stadium was ‘Let’s meet at the Anatolian peak’, showcasing performances about Anatolian culture and traditions, representing outstanding personalities and features of Anatolia, as well as Turkish history, folklore and stories of modern Turkey.

The opening ceremony was to be broadcast live to a world audience and beside the video and lighting, the show included dance performances and firework displays.

Running 24 Christie HD 18K Projectors and 6 Hippotizer HD media servers, plus one real time back-up server, Phantom Event Engineering arranged all the equipment and crew to set-up the system. Together with the invaluable work of Shay Bonder and Itay Gal, who took care of all the video programming and on-site adjustments, they created an unforgettable event.

The ceremony required an extensive two part set-up. One for the 76x55m stadium floor projection and a second for the projection on the centre stage mountain set.

Sedat Gündüz from Phantom Event Engineering comments: “With 4 days of set-up and 3 days of rehearsals, the Hippotizer media servers worked very well without any failure or problem.”

The large floor projection set-up had a total of 16 Christie HD 18K projectors each with a 1.4-1.8 lens, set up in clusters of two in four towers on either side of the stadium. The projectors are placed at a 360° angle to the floor (facing the ground) and the 76x55m floor space was divided into 8 equal sized parts for the 8 clusters of projectors.

These 16 projectors were controlled by 4 Hippotizer HDs on dual output mode and using the Hippotizer’s Virtual Media Manager and the UberPan component, they managed to seamlessly integrate the multiple outputs into one large 76x55m canvas.

Initially the single piece of ultra high resolution content was automatically split into 8 equal parts for the 8 floor sections using the Media Manager. This was then distributed to 8 separate outputs and re-integrated using UberPan.

The central mountain set was 14m in height and 20m width with 8 projectors arranged for the display. For the seamless projection onto this set 4 clusters of 2 projectors were placed under the roof in the four corners of the stadium, all being controlled by two Hippotizer HDs on dual output.

All 24 projectors were connected via Christie Net using fiber optic cables, 48 Etherwan fiber optic Cat 5 extenders, 4x 1 Gigaswitch, 12x 10/100 switch for Christie Net allowing for adjustments to be done on all projectors simultaneously.

A total of 36x 200m/300m fiber optic cables were used to connect the Hippotizers to the Christie projectors and all Hippotizer outputs were passed through Extron EDID modules to have constant signals on each output eliminating the risk of undetected projectors.

With a wireless network set up, the Hippotizer HDs could be controlled via HippoNet, which was enormously helpful to fine-tune the masking onto the set using ScreenWarp on site.

The signal distribution and transmission was taken care of by TV One DVI Das and TV One DVI fiber optics transmitters/receivers and at front of house one full size GrandMA2 was used to control the 7 Hippotizer HDs.

A recent addition to our customers, this was the first major event that Phantom Event Engeneering used their newly acquired Hippotizer HDs for and we, at Green Hippo, are extremely impressed with the incredible display they achieved for a project of this scale.

Samantha Bailey at Green Hippo states: “The creativity and complexity of the show left a real impression on both the audience and everyone at Green Hippo. We are delighted to be working with Phantom and we look forward to seeing their next Hippotizer event.”

To watch the opening ceremony click here or here.

Click here to contact Phantom.