Fastest projection for "London's Fastest Night" at Tate Modern

To cover the entire east section of the Turbine Hall, and for it to be visible during the daytime as well as in the evening, QED chose to deploy twenty-two 30,000 lumen projectors, delivering a total of 660,000 lumens of illumination. Fourteen Panasonic RZ31K lasers projectors were used to cover the side walls with eight Christie 4K/30 Boxers covering the East Wall and the Bridge. Access to the venue was only possible from 22.00 at night after it was closed to the public, and the entire system (power, rigging, control, fibre distribution, projector installation and line-ups) had to be fully set up before the sun came up at 05.00am, so it was very much a race against time.

"Despite the sunshine everything was clearly visible throughout the day, and when the sun went in it looked absolutely amazing" said QED Director Paul Wigfield. "Daylight projection of this scale and in this timeframe would not have been possible without the very latest low power 30K lumen projectors. It was a real technical first. A year ago we would have needed double the numbers of projectors to achieve the same result that we did on Sunday. In terms of the fastest deployment of so much projection brightness it's definitely a record for us."

Watchout V6 was chosen as the playback platform, running on QED's 4K Infinity servers - 18 x HD outputs and 4 x 4K outputs in total, with pixel sizes evenly balanced across the different sized surfaces, creating a 360 degree projection canvas. The live race Leaderboard and Results feeds from HS Sports were fed into the Watchout system at 4K resolution via 4 x HDSDI inputs on the Vision SC-SD14 capture cards and mixed with the content created by Rosie Lee.

To bring an end to QED's fastest weekend the whole thing had to be de-rigged and loaded out before the Tate opened its doors again to the public on Monday morning, so the only thing left to do after that was go to sleep.

QED Key Personnel

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