John's Entertainment Technology Blog
Kaboom Control
Saturday, July 4, 2009 at 08:00AM in Entertainment Technology, Interesting Show by John Huntington As you head out to see the fireworks tonight, keep in mind all those pyro technicians out there risking their lives for the show.
Also, from a control perspective, keep in mind that many of the shows you see still might be fired using a board full of toggle switches (a "Button Board"--a vast improvement over the "nail" board of the past). Here''s some screen grabs from a great show running on PBS stations this weekend called "321 Fireworks"
These shots were from the 2007 Washington, DC display, and this show was provided by Pyro Shows in Tennesee. All those tehnicians are listening to a special sound track that the public doesn't hear, which has a voice recorded in sync with the music that sounds like a theatrical Stage Manager or a television Director, "Ready 1, Go, Ready 2-4, Go", etc. On each cue, they throw one or more switches.
Of course, there are much more sophisticated ways to shoot fireworks these days, like this popular system from FireOne:
And, my controlling-dangerous-things expert friends over at Birket have a great document on pyro/fireworks electrical control safety here.
Speaking of safety, the 321 Fireworks show had some great video from Pyro Shows testing the safety of the bunkers they create for their workers (skip to about 3:00 for the best part):
Obamatronics Live
Friday, July 3, 2009 at 12:58PM in Entertainment Technology, Interesting Show by John Huntington The Hall of Presidents at Disney in Orlando now includes President Obama (as I previously wrote here), and here's two behind the scenes videos. The first is from Disney:
Of course, don't trust the editing and the voice over--when it says "digital audio" they actually show a pretty old ETC lighting console. And the Disney animatronic control system (you can see the animator controlling it--lots of knobs and buttons) is Disney custom and getting a bit old these days--I just got a good look at it when in Orlando for Infocomm (sadly, no pictures allowed backstage). But the end result of the motion of the figure is pretty incredible.
This second one is from the Whitehouse:
Interesting mic set up, with one shotgun mic and one large diaphram condenser. I wonder how many different back up systems they had in place--this is a gig you do NOT want to ask for a retake! And, given everything else on Mr. Obama's plate, I'll forgive him for thinking that Disney have 3D, large scale holograms these days (no one does, as I've writtten about before).
Here's some onsite video of the attraction:
This will definitely be on my list to see during my trip back to Orlando in November for LDI.
First Ethernet Cable
From Boing Boing, along with this:
Behind an ordinary door in a nondescript room hosting several printers and copiers at PARC is the world's first Ethernet cable. In 1973, Bob Metcalfe sent an internal memo to his colleagues at Xerox proposing a local system of interacting workstations, files, and printers. The devices would all be linked by one coaxial cable, he said, and would run within a local area network. He called the system an Ether Network, or Ethernet. By 1976, there were over 100 devices linked into Metcalfe's local network, and it was even used to test out the world's first laser printer, which was being developed concurrently in another research facility within Xerox. Metcalfe and his assistant David Boggs published their findings in the Association for Computing Machinery later that year. The rest is history.
Go to the Boing Boing link for Metcalf's original drawings of the system.
Thinkwell Design
There's a great write up on the design company Thinkwell on The Theme Park Insider here. Thinkwell has an impressive resume, and its CFO is my old friend François Bergeron.
An interesting quote from the Theme Park Insider piece:
"I think you can see the things out there that were driven by technology and not story," Warner said. "And I think that we people see them, they say, this doesn't make sense. As much as everyone like looking at a Kuka, the mechanical robot arm in a factory, you have to find a way to tell a story around it."
Hanna jumped back in: "Your interest wanes very quickly when your experience is based just on technology. It's gonna get old really, really fast. It's got to be based on a timeless experience."
Shadow of Junk
Wednesday, July 1, 2009 at 08:00AM in Entertainment Technology, Interesting Show by John Huntington 
Stage Technology F:Light
I saw a very interesting item in Live Design for its lighting product of the year, the Stage Technologies F:light. From the F:light website:
F:light is a new product designed to bridge the gap between lighting and automation. Developed by Stage Technologies, arguably the original innovators of automated 3D flying, it allows moving lights to automatically track moving scenery or performers, whilst remaining fully under the lighting designer’s control.
Stage Technologies has long been doing interesting and forward-looking work, and was one of the first to export its positional data for other systems to read. They did this in a custom way on Cirque du Soleil's Ka, and I have an article which details their approach here. The F:light data sheet says that the product supports ACN (streaming ACN, I assume) and this is great--in fact, this kind of thing is exactly what I described in my "The ACN Future is Here" article (copy here) back in 2007.
If anyone has any experience with this system (good or bad), please post a comment!
Fluoro Farm
Monday, June 29, 2009 at 08:00AM in Entertainment Technology, Interesting Show by John Huntington Very cool art install in England by Richard Box called "FIELD" (via Boing Boing). Box apparently had fluorescent tubes placed in interesting patterns below high-voltage power lines. The tubes illuminate from induced voltage from the electro-magnetic field from the power lines. It's a very cool idea. (Note: I say "apparently" because Box's website is broken and I couldn't find any evidence that he actually did this other than lots of still photos).
Picture from Channel 4.
Picture from Gizmodo.
IEEE 802.1 AVB--Audio and Video Sync'd Over Ethernet
One of the very interesting things I saw at Infocomm was a live demonstration of IEEE 802.1 AVB (Audio-Video Bridging). Ellen Juhlin from Meyer Sound told me about the demo, which is of particular interest to Meyer since they are using the technology as the core of their new D-Mitri product line (basically, the replacement for the Meyer/LCS Matrix 3 system). At the demo, I spoke with Robert Boatright, Director of Research, Harman Corporate Technology Group, who has a great writeup on the system for Embedded Systems Design (ESD) Magazine, which is available online here.
Here's a little blurb from that article, explaining what the standard is:
A multiyear effort by the IEEE 802.1 Audio/Video Bridging (AVB) Task Group is nearing completion on a series of enhancements to the legacy Ethernet standards that enable the delivery of time-synchronized, low-latency audio and video over Ethernet networks--with perfect Quality of Service (QoS)--while retaining 100% compatibility with legacy Ethernet networks.
IEEE 1722, the AVB Transport Protocol (AVBTP), has further built on the development of AVB by adapting IEEE 1394's comprehensive suite of media formats, encapsulations, and synchronization mechanisms for use in Ethernet AVB networks. Products using IEEE 802.1 AVB and AVBTP standards are now being introduced that enable the construction of highly interoperable Ethernet networks capable of streaming audio and video with perfect QoS.
To translate this tech-ese and expand on it a bit: 802.1 AVB is offering synchronized transmission of multi-channel audio and video with a 2 millisecond throughput time over open-standards-based Ethernet, with one catch (see below). And it's working today.
Harman's pro division is obviously interested in this, but I would guess their consumer divisions are very interested too--think about replacing that mess of cables and interconnects in a typical home theater with simple, low-cost Ethernet. For someone like Meyer, AVB offers a very effective backbone for their new products that is potentially interoperable with other manufacturers.
What's the catch I mentioned above? The network which transports these audio and video streams must use Ethernet switches that are compliant with the standard. These switches are capable of measuring the transport and throughput delay of each bit of data that passes through them, and send that information along with the information. The receiving device can then properly reconstruct the time reference, synchronize them, and play them back together. Here's a graphic from Mr. Boatright's ESD article (linked above) to explain the concept:
(It's interesting that they chose stage monitors for their example, as these are some of the most time-critical applications in live sound).
Sound expensive? It doesn't need to be, because major companies like Broadcom, who make the chipsets used by major switch manufacturers, are integrally involved in the standards effort. In fact, in the small picture at the top of this entry (click for larger image) you can see a BSS (Harman)-branded Netgear switch running the AVB Broadcom switch chip. I spoke with Yongbum "Yong" Kim from Broadcom at the show, and Broadcom is very much behind this, as are other major players in the field.
This looks like it could be a very cool technology for both consumer and pro audio/video applications. Mr. Boatright said that the group is now looking into the possibilities of including some control in or with the standard, so of course I recommended that he look into ACN right away.