"Of course 3D mapping has been around for quite some time, but we have developed our own in-house tools in order to provide this service at the best quality possible," states the company's CEO, Hadi Al Bahra.
He specified two stacked Christie HD 8K projectors to handle the 3D mapping projection onto the stage. The native 1080 HD resolution three-chip DLP 8,000 ANSI lumen digital projector offers a variable contrast ratio of 1600-2000:1.
"The effect was sensational and the two projectors collectively provided 16,000 ANSI lumens for the entire stage," he said.
TechnoMedia has only been working with the University since the beginning of this year, yet the graduation ceremony in the 700-capacity auditorium was the third event staged for them.
"We proposed the idea of 3D mapping projection to the University - and they agreed to have it as the main attraction of the graduation ceremony," says Al Bahra. "It was a huge success."
Each year TechnoMedia updates its inventory to allow the IT and events production team the opportunity to extend its design capabilities, and the company has now adopted the Christie HD family as its high-definition platform.
"In 2008 we wanted to start the Eyeliner 3D virtual hologram services, which required us to display media in HD resolution," explained Al Bahra. Around the same time they purchased the first, of their two, Christie HD8K's.
"We looked at a number of projector brands, but due to the technical capabilities of the Christie products - and the support of its after sales team based in the region - we decided to go with them. The HD8K's gave us more than enough output, since we had full control of ambient lighting."
At the graduation ceremony the Christie HD8K's, were mounted on flight cases using the stacking cages and projecting in 16:9 aspect ratio using fixed 0.76:1 lens attachments. They took feeds from TechnoMedia's own HD server.
All the media content was created using 3D Max and Adobe Creative Suite 3, and produced by the company's media creative and production department. "We used a mixture of studio movie shots and digitally created media, and as a general principle used matte painting for old architecture, with flag and cloud animation."
Rotoscoping techniques - manually creating a matte for an element on a live-action plate so it can be composted over another background - were used, along with other special effects. These were applied for certain sequences. This was shot and recorded at TechnoMedia's studio, and produced in MPEG2 format, under the company's creative team director, Mohamed Azoon.
(Jim Evans)
