Green Hippo

Hippotizer at the Heart of Laulu Suomelle

Hippotizer at the Heart of Laulu Suomelle

Lighting Designer Mikki Kunttu and server integrator Johan West took their Hippotizer media server experimentation to a whole new level during a recent staging of a historical drama production, Laulu Suomelle for Finish broadcaster YLE in Finland during April 2009. The 2 man team staged a first for Green Hippo products and possibly a first for media servers as we know them for this historic event. The Hippotizer was placed at the end of the production chain and many images broadcast came directly from the server's output with effects and manipulation done inside the Green Hippo product.  Hippotizer handled all the inserts for the transmission and much of the live camera footage was treated with the Hippotizer’s built-in effects bank too before being broadcast.

The show was staged in a cathedral in Porvoo, a town 50km from the Finish capital of Helsinki. This venue is famous for being the very place where agreements were undertaken in 1809 leading to treaties between neighbouring countries about the political and geographical makeup which remains in many forms to this day. The performance marked the 200 year anniversary of this historic agreement. With a story based on Finland's political interactions through history with neighbouring Russia and Sweden the audience was bound to included many high ranking dignitaries from Finish parliament, including the Finish President Tarja Halonen and key political and cultural figures from Sweden and Russia. This was prime time television for the Scandinavians and was broadcast live by YLE.

The show was built around one Hippotizer HD server fitted with an SDI input card and controlled from Mikki's Grand MA console in conjunction with Green Hippo's Zoo Keeper control software front of house with West. Projection was handled by 2 Panasonic PT-DW10000E projectors which were assembled into a rig allowing them to lie on their sides and maximise pixel usage whilst enabling portrait based canvases for media display. Transparent projection cloths were rigged as projection surfaces to create depth and atmosphere whilst accommodating the architectural restrictions of the cathedral. The Hippotizer also handled keystoning and scaling duties throughout.

The lead up to the ceremony included a march which began in the town centre and concluded at the cathedral which was covered by YLE's camera crew. These images were fed live into the Hippotizer via SDI, treated with the system's onboard effects to create the look of old archive footage and projected onto semi-transparent screens on stage that served as an interactive backdrop for the drama throughout.

Once inside the venue a full theatrical performance re-enacted the historic events which led to huge political and cultural change for the three countries involved. This performance was supported with images from history projected onto the screen and mixed once again with live camera feeds.

"This production was the ideal vehicle for me to try something I envisaged 5 years ago when I first started to work with media servers" says Kunttu.  "Since the first days of operating servers I have always been excited by the concept of live camera feeds as a kingpin for an entire show but only recently has this been possible with the advances in the current Hippotizer releases.  Until recently the finesse just wasn't there with any system. Image quality on the Hippotizer is now well within broadcast requirements and placing the Hippotizer at the heart of the production, taking everything I could gather from other sources around me then feeding it all into the Hippo and manipulating it live was a landmark moment for me and needless to say, a huge buzz!  I was realising something I'd wanted to do for several years and the results seemed to go down exceptionally well.  I have to thank those who put their faith in me putting a media server at the heart of a live TV broadcast of this importance and trusting my judgement. The feedback has been great and I can see myself shifting toward making Hippotizer move from a source to the core of more of my shows when that approach adds value to a production."

Johan West provided pre-production consultancy and on site integration/operation for Hippotizer. Johan is half Swedish living in Finland so the subject matter was all the more poignant for him. He sees this event as a landmark moment for how these systems will be used by him and his associates. "The systems impressed a lot of people who knew little about them. There were a few surprised faces when we began to feed our treated images and camera signals back to the OB truck for transmission. The most surprised guy was the sound engineer who said he'd never encountered a system which gave zero frames of video delay for him to correct. It's a relief to have confidence that delay, the arch-enemy of live camera relay, is now a thing of the past and this has many people re-evaluating the Hippotizer and its potential applications up here in Finland and Scandinavia as a whole. It also makes me proud because I've been close to Green Hippo with this system since version one many years ago. Now it makes me look a bit less of a madman when national broadcasters are applauding its use on a live TV show. And there was something satisfying about us introducing zero delay which was the envy of the OB truck!"

Laulu Suomelle was broadcast live to much acclaim in March of this year by YLE. 

Video equipment

1 x Hippotizer V3r2 HD + 1 spare

1 x HippoCritter as Zookeeper Control FOH

1 x Matrox Triplehead To Go

1 x SDI capture card

1 x TVOne SDI scaler

2 x Folsom ImagePro HD`s

2 x Panasonic PT-DW10000E projectors + 1 spare

 HD + 1 spare

You can catch up on this and many other interesting projects by visiting Mikki’s Blog at: http://mikkikunttu.blogspot.com/