2019 CCTV Chinese New Year’s Gala

VYV’s technologies used in the most watched TV show in the world.

The CCTV New Year’s Gala is an annual television event broadcast by the National Chinese Television. It is an opportunity to display China’s cutting-edge technological innovations, and VYV’s reliable tools have been entrusted to help put together this manifestation of undeniable political, economical and cultural significance.

The 2019 Gala was held on February 4th. It was shot mainly in Beijing, with segments recorded in three other cities. VYV teamed up with Redline, a China-based AV company specialized in large-scale events to work on the sets in the satellite location of Shenzhen.

The two VYV specialists dispatched on location had only ten days for pre-production and one week to install. A monumental 200-meter-long floor made of LED screens served as the main stage for more than three hundred dancers and actors.

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Our team had to find a way to simultaneously track the movements of thirty-six ballerinas and fourteen hoverboards so that each performer would trigger video events on the LED floor. The tight schedule did not allow for a dress rehearsal with the dancers. Tracking fifty fast-moving objects across important distances despite the interference of a crowd was quite a challenge.

VYV’s people equipped each ballerina and each hoverboard with two Copernic infrared emitters. They acted as reference points for the fourteen tracking cameras placed around the floor. Through the Albion module, tracking information collected by the cameras was retrieved and transmitted to eight Photon media servers. Acting as a conductor, Photon made sure to play the right video at the right time while listening and adjusting to the inputs from the outside.

“The total resolution of LED screens that we had to map, meaning the stage, the LED floor on which the ballerinas were performing and the other section dedicated to the hoverboards, was 100 megapixels. This is the equivalent of twelve 4K streams.”

-Tommy Lahitte, Photon Specialist

This prowess would have been impossible to achieve without the flexibility and adaptability of our tools. The well-tried combination of Copernic IR emitters, Albion and Photon made it possible to adapt to ever-changing requests and conditions on site. Albion transmitted all tracking information to Photon display servers, processing large numbers of tracking points and fast-moving objects without confusion. The most ambitious gala in China unfolded flawlessly, before the very eyes of its millions of viewers. VYV’s tools have once again performed at their best and proved their reliability in contexts that do absolutely not allow for mistakes.