On the 10th December 2009, QED were involved in a historical cinematic event that would go on to become the world's highest grossing film to date. The premiere of James Cameron's Avatar attracted a star-studded audience worthy of such a spectacle. Onlookers were treated to whole host of celebrities walking the blue carpet, all the while basking in the glow of an UltraWideScreen that James Cameron himself stated would like to have in his living room!

To deliver the massive outdoor UltraWideScreen the premiere’s audio-visual supplier Presentation Rentals called upon QED’s specialist expertise. The requirement to provide a high brightness outdoor display at ultra high resolution with only a few hours to install the whole rig required extreme processing power, so this became the first major outing for QED’s latest acquisition, the revolutionary Christie Spyder X20 video processor. The 120ft wide by 12ft high UltraWideScreen was covered by six seamlessly edge-blended Christie HD18Ks projectors projecting at various angles from the canopy of the Odeon cinema using a variety of lenses to achieve the coverage. Each output from the X20 provided the projectors with a 1920 x 1080 DVI signal which combined to deliver the massive 10,800 x 1080 pixel canvas.

The video content had to be specially created to fit this extreme size but the end product was visually stunning and fitting of a premiere of this magnitude. Watch the video to the right to see the final result and what James Cameron himself had to say about it.

Key technical equipment

  • 1 x Christie Spyder X20 video processor
  • 6 x Christie HD18K 3-chip DLP HD projectors
  • 6 x QED DVI/Ethernet fibre channels
  • 2 x Apple Mac Pro computers
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