Pixway studio and designer Peter Nigrini use Disguise solutions to beautify the live performance of Hans Zimmer concerts
Scenic designer Peter Nigrini, projection specialist Peter Nigrini has been chosen to develop an unprecedented scenographic project for Hans Zimmer’s world tour. The professional has enlisted the help of the Pixway studio to bring his idea to reality through Disguise technology.
In addition to being one of today’s most prolific and renowned film music composers, Hans Zimmer is also noted for his world tours, which offer music fans an accessible way to enjoy his compositions performed by a full orchestra. For his 2022 tour, which covers 24 cities, Zimmer wanted to create an experience for his audiences that has a distinctly theatrical sensibility.
“Giving each piece of music a visual identity was first and foremost, but we also needed to meet this challenge while integrating live cameras to show the audience what was happening on stage in venues as large as stadiums,” says Peter Nigrini.
To create the look and feel of the production, Nigrini worked with Berlin-based creative studio Pixway with the goal of creating a live experience that looked nothing like those seen at other concerts. One of the ideas the team came up with was to process and treat all the live camera outputs so that the sequences of the different suites felt aesthetically linked to the films from which the music came.
To achieve this, they had to color grade the live footage as it was being shot, as well as other Notch processing created by Emery Martin. It was this process that led Pixway to suggest using disguise’s RenderStream workflow with two rx real-time render nodes and two vx 4 media servers. The team needed minimal equipment to run the entire program. They were able to use the disguise vx and rx machines to feed all live processing.
“By being able to offload Notch rendering to the rx machines, sufficient processing power was maintained on the vx machines for other parts of the show, such as automation and video playback. In terms of workflow, the Notch rendered images could be used just as easily as the other video inputs, which greatly streamlined programming. With this technology, we were able to send all 14 cameras to the render node for processing in packs of four. Texture swapping is extremely fast and only adds a few frames to the round trip, so it integrates seamlessly into existing environments,” adds Pixway’s Nevil Jeremias.
The team also took advantage of the project to test the latest version of disguise r21 software. This program brought significant improvements to the RenderStream user interface and new tools for color management.
