Festival Etiquette/Best Practices for newbies?

[charliepiierre]

Hi everyone, I’ve got some festival etiquette/best practice questions:

I’ve just booked a gig VJing for a band on the main stage at a festival, the scale of which I haven’t worked at before (roughly equivalent in size to Lollapalooza Chicago).

There’s two IMAG screens either side of stage and an upstage video wall.

The request from the band’s team is to send IMAG to all screens, and then overlay loops of cartoon characters around the edges of the IMAG to create a border.

I have a few questions for the festival team:
- How should I format my content so that it can be easily overlayed on the IMAG
- Is it a case of placing all the graphics on a solid colour that can be sent to their vision mix or media server and then keyed out
- Should I be taking their feed through a capture card and adding my graphics through layers in Resolume and then outputting the final composition (I imagine this would cause more latency than would be acceptable for IMAG?)
- Something else?
- What does the pixel map for their media server look like?
- The goal is to overlay seperate graphics on the 2:1 rear wall and 5:9 IMAG screens (like borders that match the aspect ratio and size of each screen, rather than a zoomed version of the main all on the IMAG screens) so my plan was to use their pixel map as a template to create the graphics in the correct aspect ratio for each of the three screens as one clip, and then use output masks to select and send the relevant content to each screen)
- Will they want a HDMI, SDI, or different output from my system

I’m planning on going through my TM with these questions, but wanted to see if anyone who has gone through the motions before has any advice on whether these questions are appropriate to ask and whether there are standard practices relating to this (IE: overlaying graphics on top of IMAG) that I should look into before asking.

Want to avoid asking too many dumb/obvious questions and making anyone else’s job harder.

A few additional details that may be helpful are:
- I’ve received the stage specs, under vision the supplier has noted the screens, video control system, and camera package. No mention of a media server or a dedicated switcher op (presuming this is standard and therefore not mentioned?)
- I’ll be running Resolume Arena (V 7.15.0 rev 23381) on a Razer Blade 15 (GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, 12th Gen Intel Core i7 processor)
- There won’t be more than 4 active layers of content (all 5 sec loops) at a time
- The festival is just under 3 weeks out
- The content hasn’t been delivered and is currently being made by the label’s design team

Thanks!

[Zoltán]

I think these are mostly questions which the screen provider/band will be able to answer.

[charliepiierre]

I'll get on to them, thanks!

[Arvol]

Talk with your TM. Most larger festivals don't give you access to THEIR screens (IMAG) and only give you access to YOUR screens (upstage wall, etc.). They might hand off an Aux from the camera switcher but you rarely get to touch their real estate.

If they have an E2 on site that is processing IMAG, and if that E2 has any resources and inputs left, you could create a border with a green center and the E2 could key out the green and add it as an overlay. Not to get too in depth here, but if you also format your video's and hardware output to match the screens resolution 1:1 you can bring that into the E2 without using any additional resources from the E2 but that's a big project for a single show on your end

If for some reason you do find a local vendor that will give you access to THEIR walls (unlikely), you could capture their program out from the switcher and then apply your FX and border then send it out to the processor, just note, that now the IMAG is going to be delayed and nobody wants to see a delayed IMAG signal...nobody. I've had the best luck using NDI in this scenario in terms of latency. Any capture card will have a bit of latency as it's a AD/DA conversion and that takes time. These boxes are great to have on hand, if you get the green light on being able to take control: https://www.science-image.com/product/n ... 4k%c2%b7sh
But NDI, or Capture card, you will have latency, no way around that.