AC-ET Supplies Green Hippo to XL Video for The xx Tour

	The xx on tour with Green Hippo

A.C. Entertainment Technologies (AC-ET) Ltd's video division has supplied one of the UK's live music video rental companies, XL Video, with two of the latest Green Hippo v3 HD i7 media servers, which have gone into immediate use on tour with 2010 Mercury Prize winning UK indie band, The xx.

The sale was co-ordinated by Peter Butler for AC-ET and Paul Wood, XL Video's project manager for The xx tour. Butler also liaised closely with XL Video's technical project manager, James Morden.

The Hippotizers were specified by the band's lighting director, Michael Straun and were specifically chosen to fulfil the exact functionality and system requirements necessary for the band.

Two of the Hippotizers are run live, while the third is used as a hot backup -- all running on the latest 3.1 version software.

Straun runs the Hippotizers completely live and improvised for the show. They are programmed with HD video content deriving from the new xx album artwork, released in September.

The innovative lighting, set, and visual design concept for The xx's live shows is based on dynamic multi-dimensional video projections coming from different levels and angles of the room and stage.

Front projectors cover the whole of the stage and the band; rear projectors shoot forward from behind and up above the band, and there is a large 3D Perspex 'X' suspended above the stage, which is projected onto from both front and rear.

The Hippotizer i7s were selected for the tour primarily for their live mask function, which allows very quick, accurate and flexible alpha masks to be drawn onto the output of both the layers and the master outputs.

This node-based mapping function can be instantaneously drawn and changed onto the output, and in this case, allows video projection content to be easily included or excluded on the X and the other surfaces on-the-fly -- giving them a positive or negative X option when using both front and back projections.

The tour has included a wide variety of European festival dates.

As most of the other popular media servers don't currently offer a similar function to live mask, mapping the position of the X within the video content would have also been very difficult in the standard festival changeover timeframe, based the variety of projector positions offered on the road.

Straun is delighted with the i7s, which are also providing extremely reliable and smooth multi-layered HD playback.

Features being utilized include applying H/S/C effects to ensure the consistency of the visual look across various performance profiles.

AC-ET is the exclusive UK and Ireland distributor for Green Hippo products.