This year’s annual Khareef Festival, in the Salalah region of Oman, included a “multimedia spectacle” which featured a giant monolith structure powered by AV Stumpfl PIXERA one and PIXERA two OCTO media servers, supplied by Dubai-based AV consultants and distributor VueAV.
Designed by local event and production specialist GT Stagetech, the 360-degree multimedia experience was designed to look like a diamond-shaped monolith, with all angled sides receiving mapped content of colourful patterns and tessellating shapes. Pre-programmed lighting, lasers and special effects, all synchronised with a SMTPE timecode signal, produced an impressive 16-minute show.
Khareef – meaning autumn in Arabic – marks the beginning of the monsoon season in the Salalah region of Oman. While the rest of the region is typically dealing with hot weather, Salalah receives cooling rainfall and a thick layer of mist that forms many picturesque waterfalls and springs within the mountains.
In celebration of this idyllic and most prominent season of the year, Salalah’s Ministry of Tourism runs the annual Khareef Festival between July and August, which features traditional performances alongside stalls selling Omani handicrafts and traditional food. Although the traditional event could not run in its full capacity due to Covid-19 restrictions, a number of smaller recreational activities and events were held at tourist sites to mark the occasion.
GT Stagetech’s managing director, Mohisn Al Hajri and director, sales & rentals, Croyden Menezes, decided to purchase two AV Stumpfl media servers, PIXERA one and PIXERA two OCTO, due to their compact size, reliability and performance. With both media server systems able to drive uncompressed 4K, 60fps content playback, PIXERA one was used as the director/master server and a PIXERA two OCTO – with two, four or eight outputs available – was chosen for the display.
Show director, Lalindra Amarasekara, led the team that designed and created the content specifically for show that ran three times daily, for a month in total: “We didn’t have to switch to the backup once – it’s a system that we know we can deploy with great confidence,” he explained. “The 3D environment and visualisation inside the PIXERA suite is extremely powerful, giving the programmer the feeling of working in a physical environment. This helps the tech teams to pre-plan and accurately set up projectors or scenic elements.”
Alongside AV Stumpfl’s PIXERA servers, the set-up also included lighting by Avolite’s Sapphire Console; audio by JBL; Crown amplification; Soundcraft consoles; and lasers by RTI.
