The Voice Australia

Part of the hit international franchise, 'The Voice Australia' debuted in 2012 attracting millions of viewers to the show, which culminates in a six-week live competition phase leading to the grand finale.  Season 6, which wrapped up in July 2017, used a rack full of 4x4pro media servers with DVI VFC cards (16 outputs each) to master the show’s video complexities. 

For Season 6 the show had what Cain calls ‘a base rig’ consisting of “many LED screen elements and control room set ups linked back into Kinesys automation motor controllers, OB truck feeds, the animation studio and the lighting system.  Each week, after all heads of departments met with the creative producers, we designed a number of ‘weekly show specials’ specifically for a song or act.  This could be anything: additional LED screens, four to six projector mapped blends, moving head projectors, screen surfaces – most of which had to be rolled on, lined up and then struck in a three to four minute live commercial break with producers counting you down to ‘back on air,’” he recalls.

 Given those demanding parameters Cain finds the 4x4pros act as “a one-stop shop with everything I need built into one operating platform.  When I'm in the studio, I’m running the server a number of ways simultaneously: from a network of grandMA2 lighting consoles, reacting to live incoming automation data, on and off chasing of timecode, bouncing cues from my phone for producer walkthroughs and down timeline programming.  This, combined with low latency capture cards, plus a Notch playback license, is all in one box on a fantastic visual GUI.  What more could I ask for?!”

Cain believes that the disguise previs capabilities are “one of the best advantages disguise can offer over other systems.  I use the visualisation of the GUI extensively to design the ever-changing system from week to week.  I can prove or disprove concepts ahead of studio time and plot all the camera positions so the show producers can see what each element will look like from actual camera positions.  We do all of this in our purpose-built disguise Studio at our TDC head office,” he explains.  “It saves us a lot of time, hassle and money each week.”

During Season 6 he used a number of key disguise features.  “SockPuppet worked with my grandMAs, QuickCal and Deformation Layers allowed me to line up six projectors in three minutes, and Multi-Transport ran multiple timelines simultaneously,” he says.  “The unique way disguise does output mappings” also proved helpful and “the 10-gig network and Media Versioning uploaded and managed an abundance of content each day.”