Music fans of all ages flocked to Grant Park in Chicago over the weekend to experience one of the longest withstanding festivals, Lollapalooza. Born out of the grunge rock of the early nineties and the brainchild of Jane’s Addiction’s Perry Farrell, the festival now brings in some of the top acts from all genres – from hip-hop to house music to indie-rock.
This year’s Lolla was no exception with artists ranging from The Cure to Steve Aoki to Mumford & Sons to Lana Del Ray. While watching the top names on this summer’s festival circuit perform, I couldn’t help but think about the pivotal role technology plays in enabling these shows come alive and bring these performances to living rooms everywhere, creating a way for fans worldwide to share in the experience.
I’m excited to share that Dell had a presence behind the scenes once again this year, as Dell Precision mobile and tower workstations were used to capture, edit and produce editorial content for the festival webcast, including backstage footage and interviews with both up and coming and established artists.
Utilizing a full Dell ecosystem with Dell UltraSharp monitors, Dell UPS, a Dell PowerConnect 10Gb switch, and Dell Precision workstations along with Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe AfterEffects, C3 Presents and Arts + Labor produced video extras including lifestyle pieces, performances, daily recaps and band interviews, to support and surround the live broadcasts.
The content was captured from live video coming from stages as well as footage from ENGs (electronic news gathering crews that roam all over the event capturing footage) and was edited on the workstations and then uploaded to multiple simultaneous channels on YouTube. In case you missed the festival either in person or online this weekend, check out the recap videos all powered by Dell Precision.
Timing is everything when you’re providing online, HD video and audio content during large festivals. The fast turnaround environment creates a lot of pressure for the video editors and Dell Precision was critical in providing the performance and reliability needed to deliver the high-quality content on time. The video crew has relied on Dell Precision workstations with Adobe Premiere Pro software to produce video content for more than three years as the high-performance professional-grade hardware is designed and certified to run Adobe software and it provides significant time savings compared to their previous Apple-based workflow as no transcoding is needed. In fact, in past years C3 and Arts+Labor were able to cut production time in half, bringing more live music, backstage action, audience interaction and festival footage online than ever before.
In addition to powering Lollapalooza’s behind the scenes footage, Dell Precision mobile workstations were used to power images on digital displays at the front gates of the park. Dependability was critical to keep the signage fresh throughout the weekend as the images were displayed on a loop and Photoshop was used on each system to build out new content.
Overall, it was an incredible event – and up next, Dell will be heading behind the scenes at Austin City Limits Festival in October.