Xbox One | Avolites Media

USA – The eyes of the gaming world were on Microsoft HQ in May for the launch of the eagerly anticipated XboxOne, and the spectacle didn’t disappoint featuring UltraHD media and content powered by Avolites Media AI Infinity servers.
Executive Producer of the event Jack Morton Worldwide worked closely with Production Designer Dierson Design Group and Avolites Media Ai Programmer Scott Chmielewski of DMDS7UDIOS to realise an event aimed at a tech-hungry and tech-savvy audience. Dominating the stage at the launch in Redmond, Washington, were six custom-sized HD projection screens, rigged in a horseshoe alignment behind President of Interactive Entertainment Business, Microsoft Corporation, Don Mattrick.
Two hi spec Avolites Media Ai Infinity Servers powered visuals designed by film studios, game developers, and Microsoft’s in-house team to 12 stacked 22k projectors.
“Ai was chosen for its ability process and distribute the UltraHD media and content – more than 4k – and to manage the 6 discreet projection feeds and treat it as one large surface, and for its ability to play back multiple layers of content including transparent and alpha channel video content,” says DMDS7UDIOS’ Scott Chmielewski.
“Ai performed flawlessly in this very demanding environment surrounded by the A-List of content and media developers and software engineers for some the top game developers in the world.  We needed a solution that would be fast and reliable.”
In addition to the gathered journalists, gaming enthusiasts and media from around the world watched via live Internet streams.
Using Ai, the DMDS7UDIOS team was able amalgamate visual content from the numerous sources into one singular piece of content.
“Ai was able to seamlessly distribute and separate the content to the multiple surfaces, while keeping each feed in perfect sync,” continues Chmielewski. “Second to that we needed a solution that could also handle live video input capabilities as well as timecode for segments of the show.”
Patric Dierson, production designer for the Xbox One, shares two common questions on a project like this “What’s so hard about it?  We do this all the time.”
He continues,  “I hear this constantly from clients in regards to pushing various visual elements around multiple projection screens as if they were one large pixel space.  Typically, my response is ‘I’m going to put six flatscreen TVs and one laptop on your desk.  You tell me how you intend to easily make a solid piece of content play seamlessly across all of them as if they were one big screen.’  This was a very challenging ballet of cutting up large format imagery and outputting it all across various media servers…until Ai entered our world.  Ai is currently the most user friendly way of outputting a single 8K piece of content and alleviates productions from the laborious coaching of content developers on how each specific production requires their deliverables to be ‘cut up’ for seamless digital playback.”
Adding to Microsoft’s created content were EA Sports, Activision, and Jack Morton Worldwide.
The XboxOne console, which features an AMD processor eight times faster than the Xbox 360, launches at the end of November 2013.