Crossing four continents, A Head Full of Dreams is a major stadium tour in support of Coldplay's seventh studio album of the same name. The Latin American dates ran from 31 March to 17 April. The European dates - including the band's seminal headlining of the Glastonbury Festival - were from 24 May to 6 July. On 16 July the tour moved to the US, where Chris Martin and his bandmates are playing 22 stadium and arena dates. It continues in December, with six stadium dates in Australia and New Zealand.
Coldplay's live shows are renowned for their high production values - requiring a sizeable creative and technical crew. Miles heads up a team of 14 -16, including the spidercam team and Leo Flint, the tour video programmer, who runs the Ai media servers and Barco e2 alongside Miles.
Miles and his team look after the tour's cameras, animations, visuals and the LED screens they're displayed on. For this gargantuan tour, Miles knew he needed to create a new and improved video system - specifically designed to deliver the ambitious creative brief.
As a result, he selected eight powerful Ai R6 media servers - manufactured by London-based lighting console and media server manufacturer Avolites - as the core of this new system. This was partly because he had used them on Coldplay's last tour, Ghost Stories, and rated their technical prowess - particularly with regards to low latency SDI input and capacity for customisation. But his decision was also down to how approachable and adept he had previously found both the development team at Avolites and the manufacturer's London-based distributor, RES.
Miles elaborates: "We started working with Avolites media servers over two years ago, on the previous tour. We'd already developed a lot of ideas based on aspects of the server that I really liked and also some new things that I really wanted from a media server that didn't exist yet. I was lucky enough to get involved in the development process with the software team from Avolites for the last couple of software upgrades: version 8 and version 9. A lot of my input was to do with the frame delay between capturing and output.
"This came from the fact my big thing with media servers is live capture and using effects on everything I do. The programming environment behind Ai is Salvation, which gives us the ability to customise effects using a node-based engine. This means we can connect up lots of modules and pretty much any effect I dream up can be realised."
Dave Green of Avolites says, "I got involved very early on in the project to help Ben design an overall system. It consisted of eight R6 media servers, four of which are used for front end media playback. One does a big 4k screen, which, to my knowledge, is the first time full native 4k has been used on a stage show like this. The other servers take care of the side screens. Then there is the back up for each of those, so it's a fairly standard set up for a large scale show, apart from the 4k playback.
Avolites' sales manager, Stephen Baird-Smith, states, "We are delighted that Ben chose Ai servers and software for his ambitious Coldplay video design. As the project evolved it became clear that it would be particularly demanding, especially with the strong emphasis on live video effects. But we like a challenge, especially when the functionality developed alongside a project can strengthen the entire range, for all users."
Look out for a full production feature on Coldplay's latest tour in the September issue of LSi - OUT SOON!
(Jim Evans)
