Alpha Video NDI success story
By Jamie G
Minnesota-based Cargill develops products and services that advance nutrition, food safety, and sustainability, along with helping their partners innovate and manage risk. They have operations in 70 countries all around the world and 155,000 employees. In 2018 their 240-seat auditorium went under an audiovisual renovation. This auditorium holds an average of 300 events a year, so their key considerations were extremely important during the renovation.
Their requirements were for the room to be a flexible, multi-use room where multiple events could happen simultaneously, the needed to have the room easy enough to use so that employees could start and manage a video conferencing session by themselves, and they needed to increase the overall production values of every presentation and videoconference through updated technology. NDI was the answer.
“We wanted to get up-to-date as far as technology goes and have some future-proofing built-in”
Brandon Sheffield, Senior Live Event Consultant for Cargill.
With a tight timeline, they only had twelve weeks to accomplish all their goals. They also ran into challenges with the room itself. The room has to be a diverse, multi-use room that would be able to be split into several different configurations by themselves. The live events team would be to be able to flip the room to do a fully managed show quickly. This solution would be to have a projector and three cameras with monitories, audio speakers, microphones and a podium presentation control in each room.
NDI Technology allowed Cargill to create a flexible space. Alpha Video took charge and integrated nine Panasonic AW-UE150 4K PTZ cameras and a Gallery Sienna NDI router to connect a NewTek TriCaster multi-camera production system. The TriCaster allowed the control room staff to do video playback and lower third graphics to enhance their productions.
Alpha Video also integrate two control rooms for independent production of simultaneous events and the ability to easily switch from any one of the nine cameras depending of the auditorium’s room configuration. Both control rooms had a TriCaster.
A Dante digital audio system was used to connect 12 Shure ULXD microphones along with laptop audio and audio conferencing inputs into a Yamaha QL5 and QL1 audio consoles for live mixing. Alpha Video also integrated a Crestron DM-MD64x64 control system.
Alpha Video was able to help sucesfully acheive all of Cargill’s goals. The new auditorium is particularly effective when the rooms are easy enough to use by a single employee, allowing the live events team to focus on larger, more complex events.
“Everything is integrated now. Our production values have gone up tremendously,”
Brandon Sheffield, Senior Live Event Consultant for Cargill.
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