Chick-fil-A Leadercast 2013 Inspires Excellence with Renewed Vision

	Chick-fil-A Leadercast 2013. Photo: Daley Hake

Over the past 13 years, Chick-fil-A Leadercast has grown into one of the premier annual leader development events for leadership growth at all levels. For the last three of those years, producer GiANT Impact has called upon Majestic Productions to provide both the design and equipment for the staging, lighting, and video systems, including the use of Renewed Vision's ProVideoPlayer (PVP) and ProPresenter software.

The recent 2013 event, shared live by approximately 6,000 attendees at Duluth, Georgia's Gwinnett Center in addition to a worldwide audience of well over 100,000 via broadcast, featured an impressive list of presenters, including GE's Jack Welch, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rica (via video feed), and a number of notable authors, actors, athletes, and musicians.

To best accommodate the video demands for the single-day event, Majestic Productions vice president Christian Hahn specified the use of four Mac computers networked together running PVP HD for all pre-produced content. The collection of these machines was tasked with controlling all of the synchronized staging projection, with each machine's feed going to a Christie Vista Spyder X20 processor before being projected to eight Barco HDF-W26 and four FLM-HD20s.

Hahn describes, "All of the PVP machines were slaved together and triggered by a master machine, which allowed us to take one piece of content originally rendered at 3076x1152 and easily break it down into individual compositions that could be managed at a 1920x1080 output. One of the biggest challenges in any video system of this size is to try and keep things pixel to pixel, meaning that if there are 3072x1152 pixels in the main rendering, how do we actually project that onto a canvas that is 67' wide and 24' tall? We decided to tackle this project with PVP and break down the main canvas into three separate 1920x1080 compositions that the X20 could manipulate and projectors could handle."

"In addition to those three main compositions, we used another PVP machine to deal with the IMAG screens. This brought the total screen count to five that ultimately got fed from one of the playback machines: two 12' x 21' (IMAG), one 13.5' x 24' (Portrait SR), one 22.5' x 40', and one 13.5' x 24' (Portrait SL). Due to the preproduction planning and separate PVP HD machines, everything turned out great; the content was displayed clean and sized correctly."

Hahn, who was the technical director and designer for the event, points out that Jeff Ponder served as the PVP operator with Ryan Richards manning the Spyder X20.

Beyond the use of PVP, Renewed Vision's ProPresenter was loaded onto a Mac in the video truck and used to run all of the presentation video and lower third titles, plus moderation of the event's Twitter feeds, which were trending in the top slot globally at one point with over 100 tweets a minute.

"Any branding, lower thirds, or 'standard' 16x9 content was fired from the truck," notes Hahn. "ProPresenter has the ability to handle everything from social media to lower thirds to full size compositions, which is crucial when dealing with a complex production like this. It allowed us to cut our GFX inputs from what could potentially have been four down to two. Another great feature that the Renewed Vision team has worked on is the ability to have an alpha key. This feature alone is worth the time and money to keep our lower thirds looking crisp and clean."

Basically everything seen on any screen, aside from simple camera shots, was powered by a Renewed Vision product -- including the video monitors on stage displaying timers and used to communicate with the speakers.

"Majestic Productions has been using Renewed Vision products for over seven years now and we're glad to have supported their software in our most mission-critical events," Hahn adds. "GiANT Impact and Chick-fil-A Leadercast were very happy with the set design, content execution, and end result -- and Renewed Vision was certainly a key component of that."

Tyler Reagin, executive producer for GiANT Impact, agrees. "ProPresenter and ProVideoPlayer are the foundational playback software of choice for our conferences," he says. "In the hands of Majestic Productions' Ryan Bates and Christian Hahn, who are two of the most professional production people in the business, we always get rave reviews on the seamlessness of our video. This speaks volumes to the consistent, stable nature of Renewed Vision's software and the quality of its output. It's a crucial piece of our production puzzle."

First staged in 2000 by host/creator John C. Maxwell as the Maximum Impact Simulcast, Chick-fil-A Leadercast was founded as a different kind of leadership conference - one that would be affordable and accessible to leaders from every background.