Analog Way Aquilon C+ Helps Guus Meeuwis End His Annual Groots Concerts in Big Style

	For this event, the platform not only needed to be able to do this in 4K, but also do it four times simultaneously. Photo: Dave van Roon

A pair of Analog Way Aquilon C+ fully modular and scalable 4K/8K multi-screen presentation systems and an RC400T event controller were used to merge content and live feeds on the big screen for Guus Meeuwis' Groots met een zachte G - De Aller-La-La-Laatste concert series finale.

Considered part of the Dutch heritage, musician Meeuwis began performing in a student group whose songs topped the Dutch charts. He launched his solo career in 2001 and in 2006 began hosting annual Groots concerts in his home province of Brabant. Producing this event took a lot of time throughout the year, and after nearly two decades Meeuwis decided to dedicate this time to new projects. But to wrap up the series with a bang he hosted a big Groots finale in the form of nine sold-out concerts at the Philips Stadium in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.

The stage was dominated by a massive LED screen, installed by Faber AV, that spanned the entire stadium and was shaped like multiple shields, the logo for the event. Tenfeet performed media sequencing and distribution for Groots. Dave van Roon deployed Analog Way systems to merge the live camera feeds with the content his colleague Kevin Buysse sequenced.

The size of the screen posed a challenge because supplying all pixels with unique content required four 4K HDMI signals. The live feeds needed artistic cut and fills, and while many mixing platforms offer this capability, they are limited to lower resolutions. For this event, the platform not only needed to be able to do this in 4K, but also do it four times simultaneously.

In consultation with Amsterdam-based Vision Tools Rental NL BV, the Analog Way platform was chosen as powerful enough to deliver the four-times-4K Cut&Fill. After training by Vision Tools' Jimmy Geelen, van Roon merged the content and live feeds on two fully equipped Aquilon C+ units, in active redundancy, controlled from an Analog Way RC400T.

Analog Way devices communicate with each other in a very clear and readable protocol, which is very easy to automate from a third-party application, the company says. Van Roon created command sequences that he could trigger in his own PHP code to make pre-programming in the studio easier and quicker.

This turned out to be a creative asset as van Roon used that protocol to push LUT files into the inputs of the machines. Based on the concepts of the creative team these LUT files could easily be created in Photoshop using its adjustment layers.

"A good example of an applied LUT is the song 'Ik ook van jou' where the content had red and white beams on a black background," says van Roon. "The live feed was shown in the center, using the four times 4K Cut&Fill to be behind the beams. A custom-built LUT file removed all colors from the live feed, except for red. That way, the live feed became black and white with red, matching the surrounding content, making it one cohesive image."

Groots finished its nearly 20-year run in big style with Analog Way delivering for Meeuwis and his legions of fans.