High Fashion Brand Makes a Splash at New York Fashion Week

International fashion house event creates product workshop throughout 5 story building.

This couldn’t be done with a simple routing system 

Fashion Week in New York City. It’s a full week of parties hosted by international taste makers and the stakes couldn’t be higher. 
One such party was hosted by an international fashion house in a gutted five-story New York warehouse. They invited their guests into an artistic version of their workshop. The event utilized each floor for activities, music, food and drinks, and live entertainment projected onto a big screen. 
There was a lot to take in. And to make sure that nobody missed out on anything amazing, they had 72 flat panel screens throughout the five floors, ranging in size from 24” to 75”, and not one was set up in traditional landscape viewing. They leaned against walls and were tucked into shelving. Some were even stacked on top of each other.

The client had one simple request: capture it all and be able to send it to any and every monitor. Rising to meet the challenge was Danny Whetstone and his team at DWP Live.

“We had 16 body cameras, most mounted on eyeglass with wireless packs, and 10 fixed cameras set on specific scenes, for a total of 26 inputs,” he said. “The requirement was to send images and footage from any camera to any output – that’s 72 screens over five floors!”

In addition to this massive undertaking, Danny knew that the fashion house wouldn’t want their party aesthetic interrupted with a bunch of unsightly cables, nor would they accept any hiccups in the operation. That’s when Danny decided to enlist Barco’s E2 Event Master processors to create a decentralized system instead of going with a standard video matrix switcher.

Working with Barco’s product manager, Erik Iversen, Danny’s solution included five E2s placed throughout the building. The signals were distributed from one floor to the next via Barco’s expansion link cards that leverage off-the-shelf CXP transceivers and MTP-24 fiber optic cable. This allowed them to limit the cables on each floor to only two from above and two from below. It saved them hours of time and simplified both the load-in and load-out.

On the night of the party, the images for all five floors were managed from a centralized location on the fifth floor, where Barco’s EC-210 large event controller was the star of the show. Danny explains, “It was crazy that night. We had people coming over all the time saying things like ‘I want the images from camera 101 into monitor c-73’ or ‘broadcast this one camera to every floor.’ The EC-210 is what made it do-able. The ability to grab them in groups and create pre-sets and control them all from the EC210 allowed us to put them where we wanted.”

The system did what DWP promised the client it would do, and it turned out to be one of the largest temporary installations in terms of output connections for Barco and their partners.