As part of the 20th anniversary celebrations of Melbourne’s architecturally significant Federation Square, audio-visual production company Austage Events was tasked with the installation of Joanna Dudley’s remarkable multi-panel, LED piece titled ‘We Will Slam You With Our Wings’.
Austage Events is a full-service audio-visual production company that delivers events ranging from fashion festivals to corporate AGMs. With over 20 years of experience, the company has established a reputation for delivering high-quality events that captivate audiences.
The Technical Challenge.
The 14 metre LED installation was a critical part of the celebration, and the company needed to ensure that it was executed perfectly. The primary challenge centred around the long cable lengths required to run the 4K signal to the suspended LED panels.
Solution? BirdDog Flex OUT, 4K NDI to HDMI converters.
As Mike Rankin, Senior Production Manager and Technology Specialist at Austage Events, and in-house supplier at Federation Square points out,
“It was quite a difficult cable run but we found there was some original OM1 fibre cabling in the roof near where the installation control was going, so we managed to put a BirdDog FLEX 4K in the roof on the end of a really long Ethernet run with PoE. FLEX was a lifesaver and proved to be the perfect box to get the signal into the LED processor.”
With Bird Dog FLEX 4K in place, Austage Events was able to complete the LED installation with confidence, knowing that they had the right solution to deliver the signal to the LED panels.
Austage Events Journey into NDI.
The COVID-19 pandemic changed the event landscape and forced Austage Events to pivot its operations. With many events moving online, the company needed to find a way to efficiently transport video for its live streaming events. That’s when they discovered NDI.
NDI is a royalty-free standard that allows video and audio to be transported over IP networks and, after some testing, Austage Events was so impressed with the versatility, picture quality, and low-latency performance of NDI, that they decided to adopt it for its future streaming events.
This embracing of NDI, together with the desire to take their live productions to the next level, led the company to BirdDog. They found that the high-quality image and versatility offered by the BirdDog P200 cameras was a significant upgrade from their previous cameras. After purchasing P200 cameras, Studio NDI encoder/decoders and FLEX 4K converters, Austage Events found they were using NDI at almost all their events, appreciating the simplicity of using single 1GbE Ethernet cables to route video to wherever it was needed.
“We started using NDI at the beginning of the pandemic as a way just to transport video for a whole new world of live streaming that we’d pivoted into, but it’s now become part of almost everything we do now.” Mike said.
“The experience with BirdDog has been great. Awesome NDI products, a great team, and as a bonus they are also Melbourne based!” Mike concluded.
Equipment used at Fed Square
To learn more about Austage Events please visit austageevents.com.au
To learn more about Fed Square please visit fedsquare.com
