grandMA programmer and lighting director Paul J. Sonnleitner reports: "Procon, and especially head of system Daniel Steffe, created a remarkably sophisticated network that allowed the lighting team to reliably control such an incredible number of DMX fixtures over the distances required at Maracana in Rio.
"There were two interconnected fibre-optic loops, one traversing 4.5km around the stadium roof and a second servicing the field of play, that were configured using Spanning Tree Algorithm on the HP switches for redundancy. Fibre-optic cabling, then, connected all the switches in the remote locations to the ones in the control booth via redundant paths. All the MA NSPs, grandMA consoles, laptops, and MA 2PortNodes onPC were connected to the UTP ports of these switches."
Two concurrent MA-Net sessions were run over the single network because of the large number of DMX parameters required; there were nearly 26,000 DMX parameters being controlled.
Laura Frank worked together with Paul J. Sonnleitner as grandMA programmers and lighting directors. James Lee was the technical director. Matthias Rau was project manager for Procon, Daniel Steffe head of system and Olaf Pötcher crewchief. The lighting equipment as well as the rigging material was supplied by Procon.
(Jim Evans)
