Been thinking about this Barco/High End deal ever since they announced it two weeks ago, but between Infocomm, a short visit to Ohio, and throwing my back out (it’s hell getting old) I’m only just now putting some thoughts together.
High End’s impending sale has been probably one of the worst kept secrets in the industry for a while now. The only mystery was which potential buyer was going to win the day. There were many suitors lining up for this marriage, and in the end, it was the one with the biggest dowry. I heard that Barco offered much more than the other players in this, which shouldn’t be surprising, given its size and scope.
It’s been a fascinating development in many ways, but now that it’s a done deal, I have a feeling the next year or so will be equally fascinating, especially when it comes to the integration of the two corporate cultures.
As we all know, High End is in many ways the personification of the independent American company: a couple of guys puttering about in a garage, creating an innovative and marketable product, and always, always, doing things their own way. And even though they had been purchased by a holding company several years ago, they still in many ways retained that rock and roll spirit. Barco, on the other hand, is a large, publicly traded European entity, very methodical in the way it conducts business. The company’s sheer volume enables it to do things smaller companies simply can’t.
All of which has led some in the industry to believe that there will be some epic internal personality clashes ahead as this relationship progresses.
Or will it?
Sometimes the most effective relationships are those between opposites, who both know each other strengths and cede ground to the other accordingly. Sometimes you need both the left and the right side of the brain working at the same time in order to be truly effective. Sometimes two very different entities come together to create something truly unique.
Or to put it more succinctly: You put peanut butter in my chocolate! You put chocolate in my peanut butter!
So, apparently, I’m supposed to blog more. It’s something I’ve neglected to do over the last few months, partly because I hesitate to think anyone cares what I have to say, and also because, well, we keep pretty busy putting out a print magazine each month. I’m trying to commit, so keep an eye on the Live Blog for more content. For now, I’ll just babble for a bit…
Tomorrow, I’m headed to Philly to attend an event Barco is doing in conjunction with Comast to unveil a swanky new huge LED display in the lobby of the Comcast Center they are billing as “the world’s highest resolution LED display.” More on that later in the week. They were showing some previews at Infocomm of what we can expect, and the content alone looked fantastic.
Lighting designer Marc Janowitz has been touring for a while with My Morning Jacket (and I’ll admit, I was not familiar with the band when he started), so it’s nice to see they’re getting some great play in entertainment news:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/Music/06/25/music.my.morning.jacket.ap/index.html
And rest in peace, Adam Steyh, a member of the Las Vegas lighting community who passed away Saturday. Details here:
http://livedesignonline.com/news/memorial_svc_for_adam_steyh_june_26/
So on my doctor’s recommendation I limited my InfoComm exposure for my first time to one day (Translation: Live Design wouldn’t spring for the whole week), meaning it’s time for my sum up.
For those of you who have never been to InfoComm before, here’s the only way I can come up with to describe it: It’s like watching that episode of The Office where Michael and Dwight go to the paper convention. Only you’re watching it on a network-administrated, fully-interactive HD digital sign in a crowded hallway. Finally—and this is the important part—all the funny parts have been removed.
Now, don’t get me wrong: Yesterday was incredibly productive. I found solutions to problems I didn’t even know I had, made contacts with people and companies I never would have met, and saw some of the coolest display products on the market. There’s an overwhelming aura of, appropriately, Information and Communication.
The strange part is the soul-destroying personality-less-ness of it all. I’d been to three other trade shows before my InfoComm experience: SuperComputing (which is sort of a trade show/conference hybrid), the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), and LDI (Full disclosure: I have worked at LDI for almost ten years now). InfoComm seems to occupy a sort of middle-ground between these three.
SuperComputing is pretty much the ultimate nerd fest—and darn proud of it. The technical information distributed at its booths requires a PhD to decode—and the inhabitants dispense said info with the air of astronomers being interviewed on Nova. InfoComm has it’s nerds, certainly, but they tend to seem sort of weighed-down by being press-ganged into service as part of such a baldly capitalistic enterprise. (There are many shining exceptions to this description, and, if you are reading this and you are an InfoComm exhibitor, I’m certainly not talking about you.)
CES, on the other hand, is proud of its status as a kind of festival of bald capitalistic enterprise. It’s right there in the name: Consumer. The air in the room is roughly, “Ooh that’s so cool I want one! Gimmee! Gimmee! Gimmee!” It’s like watching a really, really funny commercial. InfoComm’s attitude towards business feels like it has undercurrents of $200 hammers and in-triplicate forms.
LDI takes advantage of its relationship with show business to have personality. My theory is that you only need a very small proportion of former (or current) road guys to lend a certain flair for the proceedings. Yeah, let’s turn all the lights off, turn the music up and watch the pyro and lasers in the far corner. At InfoComm, the full-on high-bay convention center lights give even the brightest projector or the most powerful light a kind of sad pall. Let’s not even talk about what they do to skin—I look pasty even in the dark.
Look, I know I’m being overly harsh and that all of this stuff has to do with the bottom line. I’d be the last person to impugn InfoComm’s usefulness, and maybe I’m just a flaky artsy-type most of the time who is just not cut out for real corporate credentials, but I sincerely believe the day would feel shorter, the booth-banter happier and more sincere, the general experience just cooler if the organizers of the event would stop thinking so much “trade” and think a lot more “show.”
I feel like I need a guide. Or possibly a sherpa.
I’m sitting in an immense and empty sea of cheap blue carpet listening to the Mustang Girls talk about their life stories and demonstrate the dance they did for the X-Games, while a crowd of polo-shirt sporting trade show males look on. I haven’t figured out the connection between the Mustang Girls and any technology company in attendance. I’ve heard the question, “Has this guy bored the life/crap/hell out of you yet?” uttered on three separate occasions, apparently without irony. The male-to-female ratio here is roughly 6 to 1, not counting “booth décor” (not my phrase). Sometimes I wonder if Las Vegas is the best place for this kind of event - the cultures fuse in disturbing ways.
Trade show anthropology aside, the information density here is overwhelming. In the interest of aiding my fellow projection, lighting, and staging professionals, here’s some brief highlights from the mysterious North hall:
Christie Digital, Digital Projections, and Barco all seem to be outdoing themselves this year.
Digital Projections is doing some serious work on improving color depth and contrast with their Titan series. Be sure to check their Dataton Watchout-provided demo - it’s a testament to the power of both.
Christie Digital has released the X10, which seems to have the principal advantage of having every feature that Christie has ever come up with stuffed into one projector. It has onboard screen geometry compensation technology (called Twist) that seems ridiculously easy to use - make sure to see their demo using the camera. The entire light path within the X10 is completely gasketed, allowing the unit to require less maintenance, operate with a lower power draw (everyone’s talking lumen-per-watt these days) and run quieter. They’ve also added DMX control (through ArtNet) of zoom, focus, and a few other attributes, all of which are now encoded - meaning they are completely repeatable.
Barco is showing off the DML 1200 in all its stunning glory. In a show of unity with the new acquisition of High End Systems, they’ve placed it side-by-side with the DL3. This may be the best signal of the future of digital lighting I’ve seen so far - the DL3 comes off looking not-so-good in comparison.
Best potential crossover so far is still the Evans & Sutherland Laser Projector. Sure, even their “affordable” version due out on the market next year is “under $200K”, but it’s hope for the future of laser projection. 8000 by 4000 pixels from one projector. In the demo, one projector covers a 350 square foot dome, and, even standing next to it, I couldn’t pick out a single pixel. Beware: their demo reel is a little clunky, and some of it looks like it’s losing some image due to lossy compression, so keep an eye out for the planetarium-formatted material about 2/3 of the way through. Don’t be scared off if you see the 5,000-lumen number in their specs either: they are measuring it at the surface, and your eyes perceive laser light differently than a conventionally projected image.
More tomorrow.
Definitely a sherpa.
So I’m counting myself privileged to be the first to shower accolades on Dataton AB. The Watchout guys don’t mess around with this versioning thing. I’m just glad they are slow at this press release thing so I can write about it first.
Still in beta, Watchout 4 is an incredible leap forward in terms of the utility of the application for live performance and staging. I just don’t know where to start… I think I might cry…
Version 4 takes DMX input to control the opacity or volume of each individual piece of media in the timeline. I didn’t misstate that: you can assign a DMX channel to ANY piece of media, or one channel to multiple items. If that weren’t enough, you can also place DMX output objects into the timeline and control DMX channel values using the standard keyframe/tweening Watchout interface.
You see what I mean about crying…[sniff]. Just so I never have to ask another lighting designer to close my shutters. The new Input and Output features also handle serial protocols, TCP/IP and MIDI. They have an extremely cool demo in the booth using a MIDI keyboard control surface to fade images and trigger cues.
As if that weren’t enough, the new version also adds a new concept to programming that is essentially similar to nested compositions in AfterEffects. Using a feature called Compositions, you can create a new media object in your library that is essentially a mini timeline. Double-clicking on the object in the library produces another timeline window to which multiple images, movies, and audio files can be added and manipulated just as in the primary timeline. Then, that Composition can be dropped into the primary timeline and manipulated just like any other object. Finally, a solution to complex loops and onsite non-destructive editing.
If you don’t want to nest everything in one timeline, a new feature, Auxiliary Timelines, lets you have multiple active timelines in the same show file. All of this is, of course, resource heavy, but the step forward in programming utility is huge.
I could write about this all day - there are plenty of other new features. One called Stage Tiers creates what are essentially layers in your stage window, allowing you to apply attributes like edge blending only to the displays on one tier, leaving others unaffected. There is a much more flexible and utile Geometry adjustment capability. It now exports movie and audio files directly from the production machine, creating Quicktimes of the stage window with full motion video and mixing down stereo audio files from all the audio in your show.
I have to stop…can’t take it.
I think I kind of love them for this…
