“AWS re:Invent is a big show, and the audience keeps growing every year. This year, it took me a full minute and 15 seconds to walk from one end to the other of the keynote session’s primary upstage LED screen. It was huge!” said WorldStage vice president of account management Michael May. “Also massive was the size of the PA and number of speakers we installed to support the presenters and the band.”
The sixth annual cloud user event attracted Amazon’s top customers, software distribution partners and AWS managed service providers; it drew an estimated 43,000 people to Hall A in the Sands Expo Center, Las Vegas. The gathering focused on data and server-less computing.
“We’ve done AWS re:Invent with WorldStage for a number of years, and the WorldStage team always does a great job,” said Sean Glen, a technical director working with experiential marketing agency Zed Ink. “This was the largest re:Invent conference we’ve ever done, but thanks to WorldStage’s attention to detail during shop prep, and efficient execution of the installation it was probably the smoothest we’ve ever done, too.”
“In year’s past the main screens were projection. This year, the design called for LED displays. The centre LED screen was over 300-feet long and the LED walls left and right of the main screen were each 60-feet long. An additional four 30-foot wide projection delay screens were suspended over the audience.
WorldStage designed a screen switching and signal processing system that synchronised five Barco E2 high-resolution screen switchers to manage the huge amount of pixels displayed in the room.
“The extremely wide resolution for the centre screen required a massive system,” said Jason Spencer who operated the E2s along with Mike Alboher. “The five E2s were triggered by custom software to sync them together; we also had custom EDID resolutions in and out of our machines. Not only were the screens’ resolutions immense, we used a number of different layers and up to 10 PIPs on all of the backgrounds. To the best of my knowledge it was the largest show that’s been done with E2s.”
The audio complement WorldStage supplied for presentations and for entertainment by the Mexican band, Kinky, featured more than 100 L-Acoustic speaker cabinets and three Yamaha CL5 digital mixing consoles.
WorldStage also provided all of the wired and wireless mics, including a Shure ULX-D wireless system, and a Riedel digital intercom system for communications among all departments.