TDC shares insights into its video operation of 2020 Sydney New Year’s Eve spectacular

Technical Direction Company (TDC) has shared its design, delivery, installation and operation of the 2020 Sydney New Year’s Eve spectacular which focused on the video projections onto the sandstone pylons of the iconic Sydney Harbour Bridge.

TDC Head Engineer and Media Server Specialist, Steve Cain advises “it wasn’t just the projection. We designed everything from the content templates for the animations through the 3D models to the control system.”

TDC has worked on the Sydney New Year’s Eve spectacular for a number of years, and Cain was as anxious as the city to put on something bigger and better than ever before. He worked with colleagues Geraldine Shine, director brand strategy and Anthony Pellizzari, technical project manager at TDC from concept to completion.  

One area of focus was to deliver even more vibrant colours at even higher levels of brightness. To achieve this, Cain took the unusual step of specifying two different projectors to leverage the unique strengths of each.

Cain explains “I chose Barco UDX 4K32 projectors for their incredible capability to deliver the primary colours - red, green and blue - with stunning contrast and black levels.

“Then, I overlay blended them with Barco HDF W26K projectors because they deliver amazing punch and really excel in the secondary colours - cyan, magenta and yellow.”

The result, according to Cain, was a truly stunning, very impressive representation of the whole colour spectrum, delivered from a network of projection towers with Cain commenting that “it even kept up with the tonnes of pyrotechnics going off around it!”

No less important in the design of the project was the control system – which needed to be not only incredibly powerful, but also include the flexibility to make on-the-fly changes should the well-laid plans need to change for any reason. Cain chose eight disguise media servers as slave units – a combination of 4x4pros and Gx2s delivering a total of 80 DVI outputs and home to almost 3,000 projection cues.

These servers were scattered around the city at either side and end of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and linked back to the event control room on the other side of the city via a sophisticated city-wide ‘dark fibre’ network. The control room housed two additional disguise servers, operating as masters.

Cain noted “as always, it was all about meticulous pre-show preparation and planning. For such a high profile event, we had to ensure absolutely nothing could go wrong, so the entire system had extensive fail-safe built into it – even allowing for the highly unlikely failure of the fibre network.

“It’s fair to say that the city of Sydney authorities were delighted with what we achieved.”

It wasn’t just the authorities who were appreciative of TDC’s efforts – along with the fireworks, of course – TDC’s efforts were greatly appreciated by the million Sydneysiders who turned out to see the city’s most spectacular New Year’s Eve event ever – with a billion and more watching around the world. 

TDC, formed in 1981 ago by Michael Hassett, is a wholly-owned Australian company committed to providing high-end video technology solutions that enable clients to flawlessly push creative boundaries. The company provides a broad range of video technology resources and runs a combination an impressive fleet of LED screens, large scale projection equipment, outside broadcast trucks and broadcast camera systems. TDC has been involved in some of the most prestigious live events in Australia.

Click here to contact TDC via their entry in the Australasian Leisure Management Supplier Directory.

Images courtesy of TDC