Professional catalyst

Published Monday 29 September 2008 at 15:35

The Chemical Brothers’ We Are the Night tour has just finished its second summer run on the international festival and touring circuit. The show’s impressive visuals were by Adam Smith and were stored and played back via a Catalyst digital media server.

Projected Image Digital consulted with Matthew Button, the Chemical Brothers 2008 tour show programmer, about his media server of choice. Button and lighting technician Toby Dennis invested in Mac Book Pros, which they fitted with the latest 32Gb Mtron 2.5 inch solid-state hard-drives and installed with the latest version of Catalyst. The visuals show was originally programmed on a Catalyst running on a Mac G5 desktop, which was transferred to the laptops for the four month tour, which included ten shows in ten days in Australia alone.

The Mac Book Pros ran four layers of video footage, with the technicians initially experimenting to find the correct codec and the best resolution for the playback to run at, so as to look its best on their mid-stage Stealth screen. The Catalyst was triggered by the grandMA lighting console and operated by artistic director Ricardo Lorenzini.