Ritchie Harland, a Partner at AV Partners, may have the best corporate AV gig in Australia, servicing clients in the idyllic Whitsundays. But it’s not all cocktails by the pool, as Ritchie serves demanding top-end corporates with the budget to bring their events to the 1000 seat Conference Centre on Hamilton Island.
Ritchie and his team need to be at the top of their game, and have chosen Green Hippo to help them stay at the cutting edge of media management and projection mapping.
To create that latest dynamic projected looks, AV Partners have deployed the Green Hippo Hippotizer Amba to activate parts of the venue itself, as well as custom-built objects. “We’ve mapped the balcony in the Conference Centre foyer,” explained Ritchie. “We’ve also mapped a 2 ½ metre sphere and we’ve just had a 1.5 metre custom cube built so we can project onto that. For our corporate clients, it’s all about their branding and logo, which we’ll underlay with another layer of effects running behind it.”
Already owners of a Green Hippo Hippotizer Chipmunk, Ritchie and the crew were fans of the platform, and were thrilled when distributor Lexair offered them the opportunity to trade up to the new model. “We really liked our Hippotizer Chipmunk,” continued Ritchie. “Lexair got in touch with us and told us the Amba was coming out, and explained all the new features. It was soon after they offered us a trade-in for the Amba, which we jumped at. Lexair have been great!”
Running Hippotizer V4, the Amba offers a comprehensive suite of tools to make projection mapping easy. All projected images can be lined-up, blended and warped in real time, and SHAPE can import a 3D model and modify it. AV Partners have been making particular use of RegionMapper, which allows you to draw the model directly onto the projector output.
“When we project onto the cube or the foyer, we use RegionMapper,” Ritchie confirmed. “The sphere was challenging, as it was a three projector blend, but we still used all the inbuilt effects.” While incredibly powerful, AV Partners have found the Hippotizer environment to be intuitive and user friendly. “Two of us had a half-hour introduction from Alex at Lexair explaining the basics and the rest we’ve worked out ourselves. That’s a great testament to how easy it is to learn.” With Green Hippo’s optional I/O card system, AV Partners have also been able to customise the system to their needs, in their case choosing one DVI card for vison mixer input and one SDI card in camera input.
Ritchie is so pleased with his Hippotizer Amba, he’s extolling its virtues to the ten other venues that AV Partners serve in-house. “The other venues are looking into Hippotizer V4 options in the future,” confided Ritchie.
www.green-hippo.com
Australian Distributor: Lexair www.lexair.com.au
