MAXING THE IMPACT IN SOUTH AFRICA

Pixel Native, based in South Africa, is a visual solution company in the live events industry. Founded by Bradley Hilton and Johan Naude in 2015, the Pixel Native team is regularly commissioned to provide complete AV solutions for events or specialist front-of-house expertise – often including programming and operation of Dataton WATCHOUT systems. "We love WATCHOUT and use it on all of our shows," said Bradley Hilton. "We know we can rely on WATCHOUT to help us create a unique show every time, no matter the scale, complexity or the number of last minute changes!"

With the South African events market busy as ever, the company has expanded its tech arsenal to include Dataton WATCHMAX servers. The rugged 19-inch rack computers are designed specifically for running WATCHOUT shows and offer four to six video outputs. At the 2017 Loveworld Festival of Music and Arts, held at South Africa's largest purpose-built convention venue, the Pixel Native team filled the entire main stage with visuals. The sixteen output show ran on WATCHMAX servers with six outputs dedicated for the LED while ten outputs fed the ten 20K projectors.

"Using the virtual displays feature in WATCHOUT made this configuration easy to work with, as we could pull everything together as one visual canvas. And running the new "Live Update" feature was a real life-saver, with the last minute changes so easy to handle," explains Bradley Hilton.

"The WATCHMAX is a rock-solid server. For the Loveworld event I was able to run multi-layer HAP Q codec video files with absolutely no problem at all. I felt so comfortable in the stability of the servers – always such a good feeling!"