This year’s Electric Daisy Carnival, known to most as EDC, powered into action with a three-day flagship festival in Las Vegas, Nevada. Winner of the Festival of the Year award at the Electronic Music Awards 2017, EDC has grown since its 1991 launch to become one of the world’s leading electronic dance music festivals, and this year’s event, held in the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, cemented EDC’s position as North America’s largest EDM (electronic dance music) festival.
Over 400,000 visitors flocked to Vegas and EDC organiser called upon Tenfeet to help deliver visuals to match festival goers’ expectations – EDC, after-all, promises the opportunity to ‘party under the electric sky’. Working alongside Insomniac and LEG, Tenfeet was responsible for the lighting design, media control and supply, as well as programming and operating. Following on from the Vegas event, EDC goes global with Tenfeet adjusting the design into a touring version.
Above: Electric Daisy Carnival, Las Vegas 2018
Tenfeet knows Green Hippo’s line well – the Netherlands-based company has used it on many key projects – and the team chose a pair of Hippotizer Montane+ Media Servers for the Vegas festival. The Hippotizer machines were the main playback machines on mainstage, handling all of the Timecode Shows, or ‘Intermezzos’, in between each of the DJ performances.
With one Hippotizer Montane+ acting as backup, the primary machine controlled all of the screens during the Timecode shows, outputting twin outputs of 3840×2160@60Hz. The total screen area on display amounted to 904 sq. meters, made up of 7mm screens of varying sizes. Here, the Green Hippo machines proved super-reliable, allowing Tenfeet to play back 8Kx2K files without dropping a single frame. The Montane+ units were run by LTC through the audio input, and Tenfeet also employed a grandMA2 to control the duo.
Above: Electric Daisy Carnival, Las Vegas 2018
The resulting show was sensational, with EDM Sauce, the electronic dance music magazine, describing EDC 2018 as ‘the most perfect, immaculate music festival’. This is North America’s largest EDM festival, so the pressure is on to deliver, and that is precisely what Tenfeet and Green Hippo did.
Above: Electric Daisy Carnival, Las Vegas 2018
We chose Hippotizer Montane+ because of its awesome hardware capability. The Hippotizer machines did everything we asked of them, delivering great performance without any frame-drop.
Ton Swaak, Tenfeet.