MEPTIK Powers 4K Visual Experience for Beloved Benefit Event in Atlanta

posted:

15/05/2019

Creative team leverages disguise vx 4 media server engine to drive projection mapping and high-resolution visual elements at Mercedes-Benz Stadium

MEPTIK, an Atlanta-based experience design agency specializing in dynamic live environments, leveraged the commercial AV industry’s most powerful media playback technologies to deliver a dynamic audio-visual experience to attendees of the recent Beloved Benefit in Atlanta. Inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Beloved Community, the inspirational event brought notable speakers and award-winning musicians – headlined by Bruno Mars - to Mercedes-Benz Stadium to celebrate and bring awareness to the work taking place in Atlanta’s Westside neighborhoods.

A quickly growing creative force, MEPTIK aggressively adopts innovative technologies to power audio-visual creativity for temporary and permanent installations. This includes projection mapping, VR/AR, and interactive installations.

For the Beloved Benefit, MEPTIK predominantly leveraged disguise’s new high-end vx 4 media server engine to drive the entire visual experience across two, 25-foot LED screens and multiple VER Revolution Blade LED strips. The large displays and strips ran the length of both sides of the field, with MEPTIK’s creative team driving all projection mapping, screen control and technical AV design.

“The vx 4 provided the generous capacity and bandwidth required to deliver a stunning, theatrical piece to tens of thousands of attendees,” said Nick Rivero, CTO and co-founder, MEPTIK. “We surrounded the audience four outputs of 4K content, along with two HD outputs, to create a singular, cohesive visual experience of enormous scale.”

The MEPTIK team also used the vx 4’s 3D pre-visualization tools to frame and test the visual content in a virtual reality (VR) environment in advance of the event. Leveraging a CAD model of the stadium, MEPTIK brought event planners into its office to experience the content in a VR setting that put the client in the middle of Mercedes-Benz Stadium. “This allowed us to evaluate the experience together well in advance of the event and make adjustments to the size and scale and of the content that the vx 4 would ultimately drive to the displays,” he said.

Rivero adds that the vx 4 took on the responsibility of screen control, an application traditionally handled through a separate component. This both simplified the technical workflows and reduced MEPTIK’s production costs by as much as 40 percent.

“We typically use separate screen control for production of immense scale to monitor what happens onscreen,” said Rivero. “The broad flexibility of the vx 4 allowed us to eliminate that link of the chain, and centralize the majority of our production workflow with disguise.”

Ahead of the Curve

The first North American experience design firm to acquire the disguise vx 4 server, MEPTIK procured the system to elevate MEPTIK’s project design parameters and meet evolving visualization requirements. Engineered to play back video at higher quality and resolution, the vx 4 allows MEPTIK’s creative team to scale content effortlessly with projectors, displays, outputs and pixels.

The vx 4 plays up to four times uncompressed 4K60 using a high-performance NVME RAID drive array, with lossless 10-bit video. Additionally, it can capture either 16 3G-SDI sources or four 4K sources (2160p60). The vx 4 has dual 25 Gb/sec and dual 10 Gb/sec Ethernet ports, enabling faster media file transfer and high-resolution networked live video capture.

Rivero emphasizes that the disguise production toolkit elevates dynamic content visualization experiences for projects, and streamlines the integration of video, audio, lighting and other technologies. In addition, the 3D pre-visualization suite of tools included with vx 4 allows MEPTIK to demonstrate the entire show and content virtually to users so they know exactly what it will look like—a huge marketing and sales advantage. He adds that while vx 4 is built for video content, its power as a high bandwidth server allows MEPTIK to work with uncompressed video.

“Most systems simply work with pre-rendered video content; you create a video and load it. The disguise vx 4 offers power, performance and pre-visualization tools,” said Nick Rivero, CEO of MEPTIK. “We can execute up to four 4K outputs or 16 HD outputs in one box. We can maximize time and budget for our customers—with one system and one operator versus multiple systems and multiple operators. The vx 4 has further opened the creative universe that exists at MEPTIK.”

About MEPTIK

MEPTIK is an Atlanta-based production and design studio specialized in creating interactive environments that blend creativity, human interaction, and technology. We work in environments that combine video, lighting, audio, and touch, converging these concepts together to build experiences and events that leave lasting memories. Combining years of knowledge in live events, content creation, and design execution, we understand the workflow of bringing it all together. From interactive experiences and live events to content creation and art installations, we bring our unique creative perspective to every project.