Christie Pandoras Box Enables Synchronized Visual Wonder at IBM Conferences in Las Vegas

	Christie Pandoras Box and Christie Widget Designer in use at an IBM Conference.

One of the nation's leading Fortune 500 companies showcased thought leadership conferences with non-traditional visual support at multi-venue, multi-screen events powered by Christie. Unlimited Visibility Inc., led by IBM-partner Drury Design Dynamics, applied their technical prowess to both IBM InterConnect 2017, a global cloud conference, and IBM Amplify, a conference on Watson marketing disciplines, held earlier this year in Las Vegas. Christie Pandoras Box plus Christie Widget Designer enabled the combined team to turn the complex process of mixing traditional presentations and a wide variety of media content into a simplified task with visually compelling results.

Covering a venue of five rooms consisting of large arenas, ballrooms, and general viewing areas, programmers and graphics/media coordinators were tasked with showcasing pre-rendered media, conference presentations, and video from within the rooms and IMAG (image magnification) to the attending audiences. For example, one setup employed a creative canvas five screens wide that traditional solutions were unable to manage. The complexity of the variety of media coupled with mix-matched sizing required special attention to meet the demands of the client.

The team chose proven Christie solutions to resolve the challenge. Christie Pandoras Box is an award-winning family of hardware and software tools for real-time video processing and show control. Christie Widget Designer offers customized advanced control surface creation for programmers.

"We leverage the power of Pandoras Box to create animations in different ways that you can't do in a traditional format," said Cameron Yeary, visual media developer, Unlimited Visibility, Inc. "No other product on the market right now allows us to take those types of visual feeds and manage them with low latency. We also run Widget Designer in each room, which helps manage all of the visual feedback from the Pandoras system while critically observing and monitoring each screen process. It really makes the show look professional and well thought out, from the first pixel to the last pixel -- from the first case into the room to the last case out."

"We worked on the scenic design content for months prior to the event. Scenic design plays a big role in the overall visual development process because it determines screen sizes," said Walter Soyka, design lead, Drury Design Dynamics. "One of the things I really value about having a Pandoras Box on a project like this is that it has a couple of technical and creative 'get out of jail free' cards that I can keep in my back pocket. You can be creative in the venue and solve a problem with the content right there with your programmer without needing to take everything back to the media department for a lengthy re-render. To have that flexibility and the ability to solve technical and creative problems on the box in real time is really vital to me."

For these particular conferences, none of the content, graphic elements or visual input was sized traditionally except for normal 16:9 slides. The fact that everything in the entire show had to be cropped or masked would have made a traditional show format very difficult.

"Because the Pandoras Box pixel-accurate workflow combined with the ability to preview all the content on laptops in preproduction, we had the ability to not only get ahead of the game, but achieve the client's expectations of creating a mathematically precise presentation," concluded Yeary.