Maxedia on Poland’s Sopot Festival

Poland’s Sopot Festival is one of the oldest song events in Europe. Now in its 41st year, the unique scenery of the Opera Lesna in this northern Polish city attracts a wide variety of musical styles and genres.

Digital LD Artur Szyman
Digital Lighting Designer Artur Szyman was interested in using Martin’s new Maxedia Digital Media Composer on the event, and upon an invitation by Martin’s Polish distributor LTT to demo the unit, was convinced to use it. Artur comments, “I used to be a camera operator so I am aware of both the video projection and lighting needs of television, for example brightness, contrast, color temperature correction, all of which is important to achieve a positive end result. These elements were not in unison in the past but with Maxedia you have strength of integration.”

Held in late summer, the two-day festival is a major television event featuring both national and international stars. This year the festival was televised on Telewizja Polska’s Channel One to an estimated viewing audience of 5 million, with a crowd of 3000 in attendance.

Artur, who has previous festival design experience with both video and lighting, lacked the ability to control both elements from one component. “The strongest point of Maxedia is that I can manually operate both video and lighting,” he stated. “As a designer I can now have control over not only the design aspect but over the operation of the products as well.

“I like Maxedia’s user friendliness and easy access to graphic applications. I appreciate the number of features available to manipulate the video. It is easy and quick to program, both lights and video projection, and has an intuitive way of operating. Also, you only need one operator. It worked well in the show.”

Multi-purpose design
Because the genre of music varied from traditional music to pop and rock, the overall visual design for the song event was made to serve multiple purposes. Visual elements therefore had to be varied and flexible in order to create a range of environments. Artur created two thirds of the video elements himself, often incorporating still photography into the video (some of which are his wife’s pictures). Scenography was based around a large 6 x 8 meter video panel that dominated the set, working alongside some 160 moving lights including Martin MAC 250 profile spots.

Artur expressed his appreciation to LTT for their support, which he described as cooperative and excellent. He also expressed his appreciation to Hubert Szwaj of LTT who provided Maxedia programming support, as well as LTT CEO Jerzy Holozubiec and Martin Professional’s Product Specialist Gerald Heise.