Rampage is the biggest Dubstep & Drum and bass party in the world, and in October 2022, Belgian production company Slash9 Productions was tasked with providing the livestream. Co-founders Jean-Baptise Saraiva and Ittai De Vree gave us insights about their production.
The event was hosted by Sportpaleis (one of the largest venues in Belgium and one of the most visited venues in the world) and was attended by over 30,000 partiers over two nights.
Since the production was one of the largest so far tackled by Slash9, requiring 11 cameras, they knew that the infrastructure needed to be rock solid. Naturally, BirdDog was their provider of choice.
“We’d been using BirdDog products already – since the launch of their very first one and since then we’ve never looked back, using their products in many productions as well as fixed client installs.”
NDI was used to send all camera feeds into the vMix workstation. Since some of the cameras were wireless, a hybrid setup pairing a wireless HDMI system with BirdDog 4K Flex Backpack encoders was used. BirdDog Studio Converters were used to provide decoded feeds to FOH technicians, backstage personnel, and even crane operators.
In previous productions, Slash9 had used large sensor DSLR and Cinema cameras, but never PTZ cameras. Discovering the flagship BirdDog P4K camera was a revelation.
“The P4K was love at first sight. With the 1” sensor, it’s great in low light and easy to match with other cameras. Full NDI provides low latency and great image quality.”
Jean-Baptise was amazed at the small amount of cabling required. He found the ability to send not only video, audio, Tally but also Comms down a single Ethernet connection was a standout feature amongst other manufacturers.
“With Comms running on a little laptop, we had an intercom that was perfect for this type of venue, where wireless intercoms would have been subject to a lot of interference – we couldn’t even imagine the amount of XLR cables that would have been needed to get a wired intercom working.”
Overall, Slash9 found the NDI / BirdDog workflow a revelation in its simplicity, reliability and value.
‘Working full IP and NDI simplified things a lot for us, and made it possible to stream a big event with very high quality but at a relatively low budget. We wouldn’t hesitate do it exactly the same way with a lot of BirdDog products”.
Slash9 have built a solid relationship with BirdDog over the years and Jean-Baptise appreciates their fast acting support and active online communities.
“I don’t know that many companies where the CMO himself is as easily approachable as Eamon Drew – if you can hear me, thanks man, you’ve really helped us in a lot of productions”
Equipment used by Slash9 Productions at Rampage:
To learn more about Slash9 Productions please visit slash9.productions
