The 2024 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, known as "Coachella," is held annually at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California. Founded in 1999, the two-weekend event features artists from many genres of music, including rock, pop, indie, hip hop and electronic dance music, as well as art installations and sculpture.
Tim Nauss, Managing Director of Denver-based Dapper Productions, was hired by Goldenvoice and NEP Sceenworks as Screens Producer for the Main Stage. He has a history of working with Analog Way products using an Aquilon C+ on the 2024 Super Bowl half-time show and an RS4 on the 2024 Academy Awards telecast where he served as System Engineer.
Connor Cronk, Analog Way’s Inside Sales and Support Specialist, notes that, “Aquilon C+ was a great choice for its low latency, layering capabilities and all the horsepower it provides in one box eliminating the need to link several devices together. The system is also user-friendly with a relatively short learning curve: You can master all the basic features and be up and running in a few hours.”
“Most days the Main Stage had five different artists, each with their own content, creative team and, often, their own servers,” says Sean W Green, who acted as Screens’ Technical Director. Green is also Programming and Technical Director with his company, Veserius, based in Astoria, Oregon. “My role using the Aquilon C+ was to make sure the artists’ content interfaced with the screen quickly and looked the way they wanted it to look.”
“Since we had to interface with whatever the guests brought, we had an 8x HDMI router FOH and a 16x HDMI router stage right, which fed into a 48x router in the truck,” Green says. “That fed into the two Aquilons, a main and backup, both running the whole time.
“In the Aquilon we had five layers for scaling with UHD inputs, three layers allocated to PIPing IMAG, and backgrounds used for native inputs,” Green continues. “The first 17 inputs on the Aquilon were guest inputs; inputs 18 through 20 were set aside for house interstitials, featuring scenic California landscapes between the acts, and inputs 21 to 24 were program feeds and backup and two emergency feeds for announcements, if necessary.”
