disguise helped to power the recent 65th edition of the Eurovision Song Contest at Rotterdam’s Ahoy arena – the first major live event to take place in the Netherlands since the pandemic – when official technical supplier, Faber Audiovisuals, relied on a complement of the live events specialist’s vx 4, gx 2c and 4x4pro media servers to power 55 scenes on a giant LED video wall and floors.
This year’s contest, with the grand final taking place on May 22, played out to a Covid-tested live audience of 3,500 per show – with 183 million people watching the event worldwide. Faber’s Eurovision team included disguise workflow specialist Jo Pauly (of Visual Solutions) as media server operator for the show.
“We chose disguise for reliability and stability,” said a statement attributed to Ben Augenbroe and Steve Ackein, ESC project managers at Faber.” Because we had to run in full redundancy, disguise gave us the right solution. We did not have any issue on this complex production and the disguise 24/7 stand-by team supported us real quick when needed.”
During the show, the production team used the disguise timeline to switch very quickly between pre-loaded Unreal and Notch content for the 55 distinct scenes and stage markers, without jeopardising the look and feel of the show or losing content on screen.
“The show was mostly timecode-based and we automated the programming with external triggers from the OB van,” explained Pauly. “For instance, at the end of a song we went to a country postcard [pre-recorded footage introducing each country], that triggered a track jump to the correct song. So we actually had it programmed quite smartly, with the possibility to manually react super fast when the need would occur” explained Jo Pauly.
“The high level of expertise on this show was just stunning – it is what made this project such a success.”
