At The Bridgestone Super Bowl XLIV Halftime Show, legendary rock band The Who performed on a custom video deck incorporating over 3,000 Barco MiSTRIPs.  In spite of the complex non-linear arrangement of the MiSTRIPs, the Who’s trademark arrows were perfectly straight and the lettering and images displayed on the circular deck were all perfectly proportioned.  How was this done?

The unique video layout was made possible by a new component of the Green Hippo Hippotizer HD media server, called VideoMapper.  Similar to Hippotizer’s PixelMapper™ for DMX fixtures, VideoMapper provides a simple solution for the mapping of multiple LED video displays, tiles or strips, taking into account their physical arrangement and the physical spaces between them. VideoMapper supports resolutions up to 8192 x 8192 and frees the designer from the constraints of modern video processor hardware, allowing complete artistic freedom with even the most complex system.

With designer demand for video/lighting convergence increasing, creative LED surfaces, driven by video-capable devices such as the Hippotizer media server, are becoming more and more popular.  But typically the video processor of the creative surface products is limited to simple horizontal/vertical placement of fixtures and does not allow for their random positioning, or physical spaces between them.

Hippotizer’s new VideoMapper solves this problem by grouping pixels and sending them to designated parts of the output raster.  Any pixel can be sent to any x and y position in the raster, separating the output of the server from the real world placement of the surfaces.  This allows creative LED display components to be configured in any arrangement, with or without spaces, at any angle and in any configuration. 

Another very useful feature of VideoMapper is its ability to color-balance each output device or fixture separately.  This allows perfect color matching across a collection of different devices, or compensation for minor inconsistencies between different units of any one product.  No more checkerboard screens!

In short; using normally rendered content, any video display product – LED panel, strip, tube or other device – can be angled, scaled, and placed anywhere within a virtual canvas, and have its source image supplied from any part of any existing video feed,

VideoMapper as used at the Super Bowl was a Beta version that will be incorporated into an upcoming Hippotizer software release.  Ongoing software releases are available free of charge to all Hippotizer V3 owners.

Super Bowl XLIV Halftime Show’s Creative Producer was Lee Lodge.  Media Server Programming and Mapping was by Jason Rudolph, with technical support from Matt Waters.  The 40-piece video deck was built by BNR Scenery, with 109 critical connections just for video. The MiSTRIPs were provided by XL Video, as was the UVA d3 Show Production Suite used for the show’s media development process.  The show’s content delivery system, comprised of Hippotizer HD media servers, was provided by VER.

Green Hippo Hippotizer media servers are exclusively distributed in North America and Asia by TMB.  Find out more about Hippotizer at www.tmb.com/products/Hippotizer/