Adele kicked off a 10-show run in Munich, Germany last week in what is believed to be record-breaking fashion. At a stadium that was custom made for her shows—aptly called Adele Arena—75,000 Adele fanatics pack in to see the Grammy-award-winning songstress from August 2-31.
It's not simply the number of fans or the venue that leaves concertgoers in awe. It is the massive video wall—measuring over 720x65 feet (220x20 meters)—which is believed to be the Guinness World Record for world's largest outdoor video wall. The Invidis website added some important context from Fast Company to put the size of this massive video wall into perspective.
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- Kanye West performed on his Yeezus tour in front of an 59-foot (18-meter) screen.
- Beyoncé toured with an 59x59-foot (18x18-meter) LED cube.
- Taylor Swift’s Eras tour travels with a 111.5-foot (34-meter)-wide background LED screen.
Recently, we found out more behind the installation. Having supported Adele’s live shows before, Disguise helped to create, sync, and display visuals on a more-than-44,000-square-foot (4,159.7 square meter) LED wall that would be assembled to look like a strip of film.
“This Munich residency is unlike anything that has ever been done before," explained Ian “Woody” Woodall, Solotech’s director of global touring and special projects. There was no template, no comparison—only possibilities. What makes this show groundbreaking isn't just the scale of the record-breaking LED screen, but the innovative thinking that made it possible. This production redefines how live entertainment can be experienced. Working alongside Adele’s visionary team and all the other top-tier suppliers, we were able to push beyond the limits of what anyone thought was possible. It’s this spirit of collaboration and innovation that made the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest outdoor LED screen achievable.”
Per Disguise, to ensure all the high-resolution visuals—ranging from close-ups of Adele to blazing fires—were seamlessly displayed, SCN Top 50 systems integrator Solotech worked with programmer Richard Turner and the set design team at Stufish. Together, they used eight Disguise GX3 servers to power the wall with full 1:1 redundancy, ensuring the whole canvas was kept in sync between machines. They also used 18 SDI VFC cards, enabling the servers to output SDI natively to the LED processors, removing the need for downstream conversion. The show was sequenced to timecode, with Disguise’s Designer software compositing rendered visuals, Notch effects and capture inputs to deliver ultimate flexibility for the Treatment Studio team.
UPDATE AS OF SEPT. 30, 2024: As we find out more behind the magic, we will try and keep you atop the news. Now we know that SCN Top 50 integrator and official video supplier of the show, Solotech selected Brompton Technology LED processing to deliver a visual experience to nearly three quarters of a million Adele fans.
Brompton Technology’s Adam Callaway noted that the team collaborated closely with Solotech for over a year on the project, which included rigorous testing and validating workflows based on Adele’s Las Vegas residency and additional testing in the U.K. “Brompton joined Solotech on site for three days to ensure smooth deployment of the workflows needed from our 4K Tessera SX40 LED processors,” he said.
Featuring 6,200 tiles of ROE CB5 MKII, all calibrated using Brompton’s Hydra advanced measurement system to enable Dynamic Calibration technology, the setup took full advantage of features like PureTone and Extended Bit Depth, ensuring beautiful, uniform video content even at extremes of brightness and colour gamut. With a total of 26 Tessera SX40 and over 100 Tessera XD 10G data distribution units providing a seamless and flexible LED processing solution, the screen is the largest of its kind ever deployed for a temporary live event.
Adele's video wall is not even in the same universe, ginormously larger than the previous video walls that left their imprint on the live-music AV world. Well, try to provide more information as we learn it, but until then, check out some of the footage from the musical icon's concerts below.
