With the Belgian government putting the entire country into lockdown because of Covid-19, and all clubs, bars, and restaurants needing to close down, Kompass Klub decided to go ahead with their Friday night party by streaming the event online directly into their fans living rooms under the name Lockdown Sessions.
Kompass Klub are one of Belgium’s top dance party venues and usually host thousands of guests every Friday night. For the Lockdown Sessions they hosted some of the world’s top DJ’s including Charlotte de Witte (over 1m Facebook followers) and Enrico Sangiuliano (over 230k Facebook followers), Massimo Mephisto, and One Track Brain.
The event was streamed live to various Facebook pages including Tomorrowland (14m+ followers), Beatport (2m+ Facebook followers), Kompass, KNTXT, Live Nation Belgium (120k Facebook followers) and more.
The stream was a runaway success with over 20,000 live viewers on Facebook across all Facebook pages and over 1.7 million views (and counting) within 3 days of loading the videos onto Facebook for on demand viewing.
![](https://birddog.tv/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Screen-Shot-2020-03-17-at-5.25.42-pm.png" "The videos have been shared across multiple sites globally and the stream count will continue to rise")
To enable the live stream Kompass Klub turned to Ittai De Vree, owner of one of Belgium’s most innovative and top production companies, Slash9 Productions. Ittai knew for such a high profile event he had to use technology and gear he could trust so he turned to BirdDog Studio NDI encoders to create and all NDI workflow.
Ittai said “I’ve been using and selling BirdDog Studio NDI since the product first started shipping and I know I can rely on them to just keep running 24/7. They totally rocked this gig, performing flawlessly the whole time. You could say the BirdDog’s were the secret stars of the show helping us bring the party to so many people around the world.”
The set up consisted of 5 Sony a6400 cameras; two were manned cameras and 3 unmanned cameras.
The manned cameras were equipped with Hollyland Mars 400 wireless senders and the Hollyland receivers were plugged into BirdDog Studio NDI via HDMI to convert into NDI. One was rigged up with SmallRIg handles and the other was on a Zhiyun Crane 2 gimbal to provide smooth panning shoots.
The unmanned cameras were all plugged in to BirdDog Studio via HDMI including one that was on a GVM 48” slider behind the DJ’s on continuous loop, and a camera with a fisheye lens in front of the DJ to act as the hero shot.
All cameras were fed into vMix live switching and streaming powerhouse.
“Because we went NDI for this gig, setting it up was so much faster than if I went with an SDI workflow,” said Ittai. “I only needed to run a single Ethernet cable between the DJ console and the video mixing desk and another long cable to another camera for the top shot. Total set up time was under 4 hours for one person and that included rigging all cameras, running all cables and doing the pre-show tests. NDI and BirdDog really are game changers for the live streaming industry.”
With the lockdown in place Ittai expects to be very busy with his live streaming services.
“Over the past year I have never been so busy,” said Ittai. “I know it’s partly because of things like Covid-19 but I also know it’s because of the NDI technology and the BirdDog’s. Set up is super fast and easy, the products are super reliable. I truly expect NDI to really take over and become the standard in this industry”
- Lockdown Sessions plan to continue every Friday night while the Covid-19 lockdown is in place and for more information you can visit kompassklub.com
- More information on Slash9 can be found here – https://slash9.productions
- To watch the Lockdown Sessions visit – https://www.facebook.com/pg/kompassklub/videos/
