Behind the Scenes at ACL Fest & Lollapalooza with Dell Precision workstations

Hello again. In my previous post I talked about how Dell Precision workstations were used to capture, edit and power video for the Lollapalooza and ACL Music Festival livestreams on YouTube. Now, I want to take you behind the scenes to show you how Dell technology was used to edit dozens of feeds into live Webcasts and show reels from each day of the festivals. Click here to get a look – it looks really calm, but trust me, there is a lot of pressure to quickly deliver quality product.  

At the ACL Festival we also set up a “Speed of Thought” Photo Booth. Using a Phantom camera, which shoots “slow mo” video at 1,200 frames per second, we captured two to three seconds of footage and then stretched that out to a full two-minute video. We captured footage of people doing wacky things like throwing water balloons, spraying silly string, dancing, jumping…you name it. As you can imagine, capturing this kind of video requires Super hero-like performance to quickly capture, edit and post videos to YouTube for ACL attendees to see their antics on the Web. That is why we turned to Dell Precision M6600 mobile workstations. They were powerful enough to capture, edit and upload all of the videos to YouTube and Twitter at the Speed of Thought. To see what the Phantom camera can do with Dell Precision M6600s, click here. I especially like the videos with water balloons. It is amazing how they hold their shape until they explode.

We hosted several social and traditional media and influencers at ACL to give them a behind-the-scenes look at Dell technology in action and they were all very impressed with what they saw. Find out what they had to say: see Article from Broadcast Engineering by Brad Dick which outlines the digital workflow that was used; Robert Scoble posted an interview with Erik Horn from A+L taped live during his exclusive “video village” tour.  Robert also wrote this Google+ post: “The Technology behind the music festival video stream: Are Macs dead to the pros now?” and Greg Knieriemen posted his observations on the shifts in the video production industry under the title “The obvious isn’t always conventional

I’m interested to hear your thoughts… Post them below.

About the Author: Jason Devos