LED Walls, Video Walls, Your Vision on Grand Display
What is a LED Video Wall? An LED Video Wall is similar to a TV or Projection screen, but where it differs is the most important. Unlike a TV, your typical LED Walls are hundreds of assembled panels with thousands of thousands of small light-emitting-diodes (LEDs), which are essentially small individual LED lights. When these panels are assembled, they create a screen with millions of LED pixels.
It’s with technology like this, that allows Repertoire to build out temporary LED Video Walls and Screens 10, 20 or 30ft wide or more. With screens of this size, it’s incredibly difficult not to stop and stare.
LED Video Wall Production on the Road!
Repertoire Productions had the pleasure again this year to get the opportunity to produce the audio and visual elements for GameSpot’s booth and Livestream from the show floor of E3 2019, down in sunny Los Angeles, CA. That’s right! You can get the Repertoire you know and love on the road.
An incredibly exciting challenge we were presented this year from GameSpot, adding a 20ft LED Video Wall to this year’s E3 booth. Something we’d talked about in years past, but this year was looking feasible. We were ready for the opportunity and knew it was going to be a challenge.
Rigging an LED Wall at the Los Angeles Convention Center is definitely a lot of moving parts. Working with multiple different in-house teams, it’s important to have your pre-production square. Having copies of illustrations of your LED Wall assembly can be incredibly helpful.
Multi-Screen LED Wall on Display
Multi-Screen LED Walls may seem like a daunting challenge, we certainly don’t want to make it seem easy. Our production company and crew came through big for JFrog at Swamp Up 2019. Working with JFrog this year, they too, wanted to step their live event production value to the next level. This included moving to 3 LED Screens as opposed to 3 projection screens. In hindsight a major upgrade, plus a new venue in San Francisco, which required the use of in-house labor.
What ended up being a quick setup, was greatly attributed to having delegation and bandwidth available for the LED Screens. It is extremely important to remember the electrical and weight requirements when considering flying an LED Wall. LED Walls are beautiful and worthwhile additions to any live event production, but they are also an expensive item to deploy professionally.
Technical tips to keep in mind when planning out a LED Wall
Weight – Power Consumption – Resolution
The first note would be weight. How much is this LED Screen going to weigh? This is an incredibly important consideration and something you will definitely want to be discussing with your venue manager in early planning stages. Truss, Motors, Pannels, and Cables add up to a lot of weight. Our 66-panel screen weighed approx 800KG. A certified rigger is always recommended.
The Second note is power consumption. There are quite a few individual LEDs, even though they are power efficient, there are a lot of them. Our 66-panel wall has an average power draw of 2,000 watts. In order to get more breathing room with your overall amp usage, we recommend considering 210v power. Our system consists of a custom power distro that distributes CamLock Power Con from a 9 pin breakout box. Understanding how your LED Wall is powered will help you keep it on.
The Third note is the resolution. When making LED Walls of various custom sizes for clients, it’s almost impossible to stick to a true 16:9 aspect ratio, let alone 1920×1080. You’ll want to find out the number of pixels in a single panel and do the math from there. Ours are 192×192, so a 10×5 panel LED Screen would be 1920×960.
LED Walls, Video Walls & Screens Summarized
LED Video Walls, are they worth it? Hell yes, they are. LED Walls are brighter and richer than projectors, don’t cast shadows and can be built to incredible sizes. If there is one way to take your live event to the next level, you can’t go wrong with an LED Screen. Concerts, Sporting Events and Live Shows all sport LED Walls for their most important content, let us do the same for yours. Repertoire takes pride in being an example San Francisco LED Video Wall Company. Shoot us a line
