Avolites Ai Energizes Logic's Dynamic US Tour

	Visual Endeavors' design is based around a massive 50' x 25' upstage LED surface as well as side IMAG screens. Photo: Aron Altmark

Rapper of the moment, Logic, is touring North America with a visually ambitious show using two Avolites Ai servers to drive responsive, immersive content to multiple LED surfaces.

Logic's Bobby Tarantino vs Everybody tour takes in performances at some of North America's most famous venues, including New York City's Madison Square Garden, the LA Forum, and Las Vegas's Park Theater.

Production design, programming, and Notch content for the tour has been masterminded by Visual Endeavors' creative director, Aron Altmark.

"We have a number of custom servers that we've built up for interactive and media server duties over the past year, and our Ai servers for the Logic tour are based around this robust build -- namely, Intel i7 eighth-generation hexacore processors coupled with Nvidia GTX 1080Ti GPUs and lots of PCIe solid-state memory," says Altmark. "There are two servers on the tour for full backup capabilities, and each has an Ai Bondi and Notch Playback license attached."

Visual Endeavors' design for the show is based around a 15' x 15' riser center stage, with built-in lighting and lasers overhead, and one massive 50' x 25' upstage LED surface, as well as side IMAG screens. There are vertical towers flanking the stage, with large angled trusses overhead, loaded with fixtures.

"Our brief was a design aimed at creating an architectural environment on stage for Logic to perform in, on, and around," Altmark continues. "This environment is comprised of technical elements that allow for reactive and immersive content and experiences for the audience and performers on stage alike. All of the lighting, video, and content combine to create a unified visual canvas that is as dynamic as Logic's music and personality on stage."

"Our Notch integrations for Logic are all IMAG-effects -- Ai's Notch implementation allows us to program the Notch effects much more seamlessly from the Ai profile on our lighting control console," Altmark explains. "In the programming process, we dedicated a single layer of each video surface to Notch effects, such that we can always call up effected IMAG and interweave it in the show."

"Logic's fans are amazing -- they love seeing his energy on the screens, and the Notch / Ai workflow has allowed us to manifest this is entirely new ways."

The majority of the show is run using a linear timecode (LTC) feed that goes through a Brainstorm SR-112 Distripalyzer directly into the Ai servers via line-in.

"LTC allows us to really dig into the music and hit very nuanced accents -- we had previously programmed almost 30 songs from the last year of Logic tours, and with this basis we could quickly get the programming accomplished for the 50+ universe rig for the current tour's additional 20+ songs," says Altmark. "With the form factor of our servers, LTC via line-in was the most direct way without adding another piece of hardware into the mix, and Ai implemented some new features for us during this process to make playback easy to adjust for global offset/delay. Lighting, media, and lasers are all locked to timecode and run from the consoles, which make the show unified and engaging."

Altmark worked with UK-based multimedia outfit COMIX to provide visual content for the screens. All lighting, media, and laser programming is handled by Altmark and Dan Norman, who is out with the tour as lighting director / server operator. The Ai servers, licenses, and Notch licenses were supplied by Visual Endeavors.

Avolites' US partner Group One Ltd. provided technical support during the programming and integration phase. Group One's Ruben Laine provided assistance as a technical liaison between Visual Endeavors and Avolites' development team. "Aron requested some special features that are now part of Ai's core engine, such as LTC decoding without the need of external hardware; and Notch timecode passthru, which allows Ai to feed Notch blocks running within the software to receive timecode from any of multiple sources independently or in sync from the media layers," says Laine.

Logic's Bobby Tarantino vs Everybody tour plays venues across North America until early August.