CMU School of Drama


Sunday, September 14, 2008

Fully Redundant Medialon System Controlled The Olympic Opening Ceremony In Beijing

LiveDesign: "Behind the scenes at the technically challenging, visually opulent Opening Ceremony for the Summer Olympic Games at the Bird’s Nest Stadium in Beijing on August 8, 2008 was a Medialon Manager V4 show-control system, providing the interface and timeline for the video cue playback."

2 comments:

Ethan Weil said...

It's really cool to get to know this much about how this system got put together. That's an amazing number of pixels to drive. I'm still getting used to the idea that people prefer uncompressed streams for latency because it's gotten possible to move that much bandwidth. In the interest of redundancy, I've been interested for some time in different schemes for this. One argument I heard from a guy at microsoft was that LED systems on the market aren't very good about offering redundancy, which is why they tend to use projectors, which are comparatively easy to combine.

Anonymous said...

First off, was this the stuff that they showed that wasn't real? I mean the opening thing, I didn't follow the Olympics all well.

Anyways, as someone who's a bit of a newbie to the world of electronic lighting systems (I'm use to a Leprechaun board from high school I always find setups that actually have a setup interesting. This one however, at least visually reminded me of the Hog PC system, which I have a very bad history with. Now I know Hog PC is just a part of the whole Hog system, but still, this is why I like systems like ETC Eos which are self contained and at least somewhat intuitive.