Touring done economically, video style

I was recently contacted by a touring group called Hotel California, they are obviously an Eagles Tribute Band.



These guys are a successful touring band. Are they making millions of dollars? Living the rockstar lifestyle? Nope. What they are doing, is making a living, a good living I hope, but a living. They tour where and when they need to, they do fairs, casinos, concert venues, what ever will pay the bills.

So, these guys love what they do, check them at: www.hotelcal.com, and they are always looking to make their show better for their audience, but they don't have millions of dollars to have high priced video gear. So, that's when my specialty comes in, providing a high quality solution for an affordable price!



So here is our little rack, featuring the HDFrND 9500 gl from Electrosonic, Inc. This is a great machine that is designed for museum installations, not exactly the live event industry, but I have been able to take this great machine and bring it into our world. Being that I also co-own a post production company, we are able to edit and encode the content for this machine on site, so it helps. I have used this machine on over 20 live events, and it has been rock solid!

The 9500 is the middle machine in this rack, the other integral part of this unit is the Violet Audio Decoder, from Violet Audio. This is also a groovy little machine. It basically takes what ever in oudio wise and will put it out XLR. Which for a touring group, this has to be able to put out XLR.

This is the back side of this rack and as you can see, I am trying to keep this as simple as possible. You can see that there is a DVI output, VGA, RGBHV- BNC, and 6 channels of XLR outputs. Nice and simple!! On the left hand side, you can see the connector for the remote! One of the coolest part of this whole rack is the remote.

The band drew out a picture for a remote. They wanted something extremely simple to use, 4 buttons, no muss no fuss. So, to make this work, I talked to the experts!! Mr. Ian Scott from Electrosonic made this bad boy work for me, and for the band. And it is nice and small.

Just to show you the size, this is a standard 1 cup dixy cup!!

Just to finish up about this great project, I had about 9 days to design, build, and deliver this, so my office took a beating! Have a great day and enjoy a great laugh at what we've been cleaning up since Sunday.