MTV Canada Exterior Lighting scheme.
MTV Canada has just been relaunched and have located at the old Masonic Temple built in 1918 this venue has seen many transformations but is well known in the area for live music and has seen many famous live acts perform there. MTV Canada spent $9 million turning the venue into their new Studio and Headquarters.
Rutenberg Sales Ltd is the TIR LED fixture rep in Toronto Canada and had been contracted by The Pattison Sign Group to install and program an array of T.I.R. LED fixtures as part of the exterior refurbishment. Fixtures used included T.I.R. CV (linear, RGB, LED luminaries mounted on a lintel lighting the wall), 12 x Custom Cylinders with 2 x T.I.R. SP (spot luminaries) in each. Giving a Narrow Spot Graze up and down the building and on the Balcony and entrance CW Luminaries lighting the ceiling space. This added up to a total of 489 DMX channels.
To Control this reasonable size of LED fixtures Artistic Licence's Colour-Tramp Software was specified and Tony Rutenburg of Rutenburg sales contacted UK based Chris Chew an experienced Colour-Tramp programmer to come up with some designs to show MTV. After the basic configuration was set up in Colour-Tramp, day light hours were spent programming lots of basic shows utilising the built in visualiser. As soon as the sun had set the shows could be run on the outside of the building for the client to view.
One of the issues with this particular project was that the venue was situated on the edge of a very busy crossroads and therefore a traditional DMX cable could not be run outside the building to view and adjust the shows. This situation was solved by operating the shows via a WIFI capable Tablet PC. Art-Net data was transmitted into the venue's control area straight from the tablet PC and received via a standard WIFI access point. The Art-Net data was then translated into DMX via an Artistic Licence Net-Lynx O/P. This not only had the advantage of being a wireless solution and easy to hold over a normal laptop in the street but the pen based Tablet PC also meant changes in the colour-Tramp shows which are graphicly based were easy to implement and plus notes could be easily taken on the clients comments and suggestions, who were very impressed that the whole of the exterior lighting shows could be operated and adjusted via a wireless tablet PC.
Shows were created not only with the standard internal graphic tools of Colour-Tramp but also by rendering video files used to good effect to realise a water simulation MTV wanted for one event. One fun show was created by recording a short AVI file with a web cam scanning over some colourful food packaging again rendered into a show file. This had the objective of creating colours scattering across the building at different speeds.
Chris Chew commented “Colour-Tramp is a very powerful control system and MTV were so pleased with what we achieved in the original allocated programming time asked me to stay on further to achieve some additional looks.”
The final system was transferred to a Desktop PC which was situated in the main studios lighting control area. Chris Chew also gave the in house Lighting Director Drew Rabbets some basic training on how to modify and create new shows.
End Client: MTV Canada www.mtv.ca
Conatact: Mark Shedletsky
Overall contractor: Pattison Sign Group www.pattisonsign.com
Contact: Domenic Ianni
LED supplier: Rutenberg Sales Ltd www.rutenbergsales.com
Contact: Tony Rutenberg
Programmer: Chris Chew
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