Spyders in the Cloud at EMC World 2013 Conference

	EMC World 2013 Conference

If cloud computing sounds expansive, consider the footprint of the EMC World annual conference and trade show where a massive 400' x 23' curved screen took center stage for speaker support and entertainment and Vista Systems' Spyder X20s switched content for the 10,000 attendees.

EMC World 2013, at the Las Vegas Venetian/Sands Convention Center, offered businesses the chance to get connected on the latest activities, events, and buzz in the areas most important to them. Attendees had the opportunity to learn how to take their businesses into the cloud, learn Big Data analytics, secure their data, and glimpse the future in virtualized, software-defined data centers. EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service.

Invision Communications of Walnut Creek, California produced EMC World 2013 with Production Resource Group, Inc. (PRG) providing the main staging and Freelance Technical Services, Inc. (FTS) supplying technical engineering for the entire video department, Spyder equipment, and Spyder operation expertise. The giant screen was housed in the general session room and was composed of 11 stacked, blended, white scrim-like screens across a 400' surface.

"The general session room was really wide but had lots of columns, so they decided to put a huge screen in there with a center stage area for presentations and a door for speaker entrances," explains Timothy J. Durr, president of FTS. "To cover 400' of screens we had 11 double stacks of Barco HDX18 projectors suspended from the grid."

Matthew Carson, PRG's director of global accounts, knew the size of the big screen demanded a move to Spyder for the 2013 conference. "We looked at the number of switchers and felt Spyder would work best," he says. "Spyder had the flexibility to add more frames to handle all the screens. And its ease of set up and ability to take care of the blend made our front-end load in a lot easier."

Content, which consisted of graphic speaker support and EMC-supplied interstitial videos, was developed to fit the 400' x 23' screen and ran full screen through 22 Dataton WATCHOUT sources. "The interface between Watchout and Spyder was very smooth," Carson notes. "We had a high confidence level that they would work well together, and Tim is one of the best Spyder guys in the country."

Durr says that Spyder also showed off its strength in bringing in all the Watchout sources and adding PIPs with live camera shots of presenters. He deployed two Spyder X20 1608 units running in parallel with 32 inputs and 16 outputs, incorporating Gefen DVI and BlackMagic SDI Front End routing; a third system ran sub-switching to insert the PIPs into the parallel systems. "This made it a lot easier to run and control the show," he reports. A compact UDC Spyder Touch served as the control interface.

Additional sources included four PowerPoint units, four Flash demo units, and two Apple iPad demo units with a pair of Playback Pro Media DDR players for playback. "We set up the video village backstage for the equipment," Durr says. "All the Spyder control and routing gear were in a 6' x 8' area - quite a small footprint to control a huge screen."

The Spyders also came into play for the closing concert by Bruno Mars. "A bigger stage was built for him," recalls Durr. "A kabuki drop revealed Bruno Mars and a black drape was behind him with live camera PIPs on either side so the audience of 10,000 could better experience his performance."

Go A/V Rudy Tessmer supplied an additional Spyder X20 for EMC World's keynote room where it controlled a 185' wide curved screen fed by five double stacks of projectors.

"Spyder performed just great during the conference," says PRG's Carson. "It was definitely the right choice."