Eleven minutes between headliners. The sponsor loop needs to be on screen now, and the only operator on hand is the one running lights. With the Green Hippo Estuary Media Controller, that’s enough.
Green Hippo, an ACT Entertainment brand, is now shipping the Estuary Series: screen management and live switching for LED walls and projection, controlled from the same DMX console that’s already running the show.
The system currently includes the 1RU MC1 and 2RU MC2 models, with an MC4 version to follow.
Under the hood is the powerful CALICO Video Processing Architecture from sister brand tvONE, delivering one-frame end-to-end latency, 10-bit/HDR processing and up to 256 layers across four canvases, each supporting resolutions up to 64,000 x 64,000 pixels.
At load-in and during the show, the platform supports DMX/sACN, HippoNet, Companion and REST API control, which allows a grandMA3 programmer to bring screens into the same cue stack as the lighting rig, automation, pyro and other show-control elements without requiring a separate media-control interface.
“I have sat in a lot of production meetings where video was the department that needed its own specialist, truck and timeline,” says Bob Bonniol, Chief Innovation Officer at ACT Entertainment.
“Estuary is our answer to that. Stadium-grade processing, lighting-console control and a price that means the show doesn’t have to be a stadium show to get it. MC1 and MC2 are shipping now because people kept asking ‘when,’ not ‘whether’ the solution would arrive.”
