Ascender 32 – 4K: The Expert on Soft Edge Blending

Lutosa, a prime European company that manufactures and commercializes potato-based products, recently gathered together its 800 employees for a corporate seminar. DDMC Event Design was brought in to design and product the event. They contracted GSF Event, a company that specializes in rental audiovisual equipment and especially in sound, light, and video projection for events, for the AV technical production portion of the event. Sammy Freh, owner of GSF Event, explains the DDMC’s requirements, “They had very precise and unusual requirements for displaying their content. As a background to their presentation, they wanted to use panoramic pictures of employees in their workplace taken some weeks ago. It was mandatory that all pictures remain in panoramic format.” As a solution, Sammy Freh decided to project pictures on one of Lutosa’s new warehouse walls, which was perfectly suitable for panoramic format projection since it was huge and made of concrete. He created a 30m (98ft) wide Soft Edge Blending with two Panasonic PTDZ 21 full HD video projectors. For the critical image processing and for the required Soft Edge blend, the Ascender 32 – 4K was selected. According to Freh, “In this particular project, Lutosa was rightfully concerned about the challenges of image resolution and final aspect ratio. Thanks to very powerful and flexible video processing capabilities, the Ascender 32 – 4K was essential in order to create the correct Soft Edge blend setup. The Ascender 32 - 4K allowed us to configure the system easily and intuitively to exceed the expected outcome.” Two Panasonic PTDZ 110 full HD video projectors were used to display various types of content (pictures, presentations, videos…) inlayed on the panoramic background. Most graphic content was authored in Mac computers and was routed through the Ascender 32 - 4K to the video projectors, which was connected together by a Lightware fiber optical board and HD-SDI cables. The capability to support ultra-high resolution sources is another advantage of the Ascender 32 - 4K switcher, and that is why GSF Event chose to use it with four different video projectors in order to keep optimal quality throughout. The Ascender 32 – 4K was controlled from a computer through the Web RCS. The Web RCS is on-board software that has intuitive control of all seamless switchers based on Analog Way LiveCoreTM series. According to Freh, “The Web RCS was the best tool for this event which needed a few presets.” GSF Event specializes in rental equipment that deals with sound, light and video projection. They focus in several departments such as: 3D design, lighting (traditional, LED, automatic, and soon, architectural), trussing, video projection, and audio equipment. They translate ideas and concepts into technical solutions and make events successful with their know-how and latest technology. For more information: GSF Event - gsfsono.com