- Infinity Park Event Center has a new Vista Systems Spyder X20 system. Infinity Park is a municipally-owned sports, entertainment and events campus in Glendale, Colorado. Blazen Illuminations LLC of Loveland, Colorado installed two Vista Systems’ Spyder X20s at the core of a refurbished projection system dedicated to the venue’s 360º screen.
Infinity Park is a unique site featuring an events center, fitness and recreation center, high-altitude training facility, expansive outdoor park and rugby stadium with a 4,000-person capacity.
“We were originally called in by the events center to maintain and program the High End Systems’ DL.2 digital lights, but they were having difficulties handling the projection demands,” says Nate Webb, Co-Owner of Blazen Illuminations. “We sat down with the staff at Infinity Park and developed a master plan starting with a pair of Vista Systems Spyder X20 1608s running in parallel that would drive the first 12 projectors to cover nearly the entire room in 360 degrees.”
Nate Webb is familiar with the Vista Systems Spyder, so when the project came up he knew Spyder would be the solution. “There are a lot of Spyder systems in the area, so we know it is a great solution,” he says. “When event center clients find out we’re using the Spyder they get excited – It actually becomes a selling point for the venue! They’re confident that the Spyder will do everything they need for their show.”
Blazen Illuminations was tasked with reusing the Christie Digital projectors from the DL.2s, so they removed those components and remounted them in a more conventional way. “After doing some engineering we incorporated 10 of the projectors as well as two other existing projectors already in the room,” said Webb. “We also incorporated fiber optic HD extenders with HDCP to eliminate any potential of latency or image degradation. Through HDCP the Spyder X20s can see each projector and we can send the correct resolution to each.”
“All of the projectors are on a Christie net system so we can power them on and off from a PC. The DL2s did not always want to work. The new system saves us time. The DL2s all had on-board servers which had to be managed and updated through the ArtNet network. We would spend over 30 hours a week to develop and load graphics to each server for each show, and now we can do the whole thing on the Spyder system in less than a day,” Nate said.
“We used to have to align everything daily and we were much more limited in projection quality: Alignment and blending used to be very time consuming,” he notes. “The production team saves 30 hours a week in graphic and tech work alone. Now we have three media servers handling all of the video playback and nine other input sources such as IMAG cameras, client laptops, and more, which can simply be placed anywhere we like on the giant screens.”
In addition to saving time at the events center, the Spyder system requires less manpower to operate a show. “It used to take four to six technicians to operate a show, and now the production team only requires three,” Webb reports. “The learning curve for in-house AV techs has been very quick, too.”
