With the turn of the new year also comes festival season under the blistering Australian sunshine, adding layers of complexity, pressure, and sweat to productions across the country. One of which was none other than Beyond The Valley, taking place 90 minutes west of Melbourne – commencing on December 28th and concluding on New Years Day. WOOHAH’s team of AV experts championed the front and back of house production suites for the Dance Dome stage through the festival.
The WOOHAH team has over 2 decades worth of experience orchestrating successful, high-profile events at some of Australia’s most recognisable venues, having invested over A$20 million into their equipment. With a reputation for perfection in events of all types across the country, WOOHAH only works with hardware that creates value for their clients and delivers stellar results.
For a use-case that required precision of execution, the obvious choice was ERECA’s Stage Racer 2. Designed to simplify set-up and deployment in demanding environments, the Stage Racer 2 eliminates the need for switch fabrics or PTP clocking, offering broadcasters and AV companies a powerful yet straight-forward tool for live and remote production. ERECA develops fibre-based transport and connectivity solutions for broadcast, live production and AV applications. Their flagship product, the Stage Racer 2, is an all-in-one meshed transmission system with processing features like audio shuffling, multiviews and frame sync, capable of carrying video, audio, data, intercom and control signals over a single fibre link.
Julian Ng, WOOHAH’s senior technician shared his experience with ERECA’s Stage Racer 2 From Beyond The Valley: “The Dance Dome stage features an 87.6 metre wide by 3.6 metre high screen, so there were definitely a lot of pixels to be driven. I had the Stage Racer 12 at front of house where I had two 4K inputs, a confidence camera feed, and a Barco E2 multiviewer feed all feeding into the unit. The Stage Racer 24 was back of house with the LED processors. There was an additional confidence camera feed going into the unit, and the SR24’s ability to act as a matrix was definitely handy and streamlined the process in getting the gig together.”
Ng continued by saying, “The web GUI was a little intimidating at first glance, but once I worked my head around it, it was intuitive to use. My absolute favourite thing from my experience with the Stage Racers was being able to preview video signals while routing, all in the web GUI. This to me is game-changing when it comes to troubleshooting. (…) I enjoyed the Stage Racer 2. It’s a robust product and quite intuitive. It definitely fits the bill for our fibre trunk infrastructure system, and it would cover a majority of small to medium-sized events.”
ERECA’s exclusive distributor in Australia and New Zealand Professional Audio & Televisions’ Head of Technology – Mike Heard enthused “We were delighted to have been able to get such positive feedback from Julian about the Stage Racer 2’s and thank WOOHAH for their trust in ERECA’s technology and the Stage Race 2 features. We look forward to supporting WOOHAH and their outstanding engineering team in delivering more cutting edge technology solutions to the Australian and New Zealand events market in the future.”
If you and your team want to get your hands on the Stage Racer 2 line or any ERECA product, simply reach out to sales@proaudiotv.com.au to organise your obligation-free demo.