A beloved feature of the holidays in New York City, The Rockettes in the Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular, which originally premiered in 1933, kicked up the level of its digital design in 2018. Obscura Digital created new dynamic projections on the ceiling of Radio City, the largest proscenium theater in the world, enveloping audience members in an immersive, eye-popping Christmas Spectacular experience.
Over 130TB of data was processed to create over 23 minutes of animation content for seven scenes in the show. With an all-native 14,000 x 14,000 pixel map, the final delivery was close to 40TB of data (the Library of Congress being 10TB). Delta 7th Sense Media playback servers drove the media to 36 Christie Digital 4K30 Boxer projectors running as 18x double-stacks to saturate the room with illuminated Christmas wonder.
My role on this project was Technical Artist. I defined pipeline best practices for both artists and IT. In order to get artist tools work properly in this resolution efficiently, I worked closely with a lot of software vendors such as 7th Sense, The Foundry, AWS and OTOY.
