When Wells Fargo moved its Corporate & Investment Banking business in New York City to the new 30 Hudson Yards office tower, its traders were treated to a unique lounge area. Spanning the 14th and 15th floors, the open area features a 6 x 29-foot tall LED video wall from Leyard and Planar, driven by an Analog Way Picturall Pro media server. The seamless LED column displays beautiful, natural, and urban scenes, and the company says watching the content unfold is the perfect way to decompress away from the trading floors.
“Traders have such high-stress jobs and this secluded area near the staircase between the trading floors is meant as a place for them to lounge and relax before going back into the pit,” explained Dan Georgescu, consultant with Robert Derector Telecommunications.
[The Integration Guide to Video Walls 2019]
Georgescu designed the technical solution for the space and worked closely with Analog Way, Leyard and Planar, rp Visual Solutions, and HB Communications to deliver Wells Fargo’s vision for the one-of-a-kind video wall.
“The client and the architect had a vision for the space: to build a sense of extreme height and offer content that the traders would enjoy and that would promote relaxation,” Georgescu added. “Once the architectural vision was in place we had to find the right technical solutions to suit the space and deliver the content.”
HB Communications, number 13 on the 2019 SCN Top 50 list, was charged with the integration and building of the space, and its creative services team designed the custom content specifically to fit the unique shape of the video wall. “The architects did a good job choosing the shape of the wall to complement the space,” said vice president of marketing Dan Barron, who was also the creative director for the project.
The content on the screen is a mix of locations—from New York to Yosemite to San Francisco. “it’s easy to get nice portrait or landscape shots of the natural world, but we had to think about what would work for such a narrow strip of wall,” Barron explained. “We used RED cameras to capture the 8K content, which was organized into two categories: city and energy."
“Although the video wall does not display 8K, we shot 8K so when you pare the image area down to a narrow strip, you still have enough resolution to look good at that huge scale,” Barron added.
“We had to have enough vertical pixels to make sure we weren’t stretching the image to fit the wall,” echoed Georgescu. The custom 8K content was uploaded into Analog Way’s Picturall Pro media server where it was split into five 1080P feeds for the video wall controller to ingest and sync into a single vertical image.
“Picturall Pro is a very powerful, ultra-reliable server capable of full resolution playback of uncompressed images on very large pixel spaces,” concluded Analog Way regional sales manager Seth Teates. “This project would have been beyond the capabilities of many servers, but it was right in our wheelhouse. Picturall Pro fulfilled all the requirements with headroom to spare.”
