The Doctor Who Immersive Experience at London’s Earls Court was one of the most technically demanding shows I’ve worked on. Multi-machine Disguise sync, real-time triggers, and a showfile that had to be bulletproof eight shows a day, six days a week.
The brief
BBC Studios commissioned a fully immersive walk-through experience — guests moving through twelve themed rooms, each with its own AV world. Our job: programme the Disguise system that drove all of it from a single master timeline.
Multi-machine sync
We ran three Disguise servers in sync — one master, two followers. The challenge was latency: any drift above 2ms was visible on the LED walls. We solved this with a dedicated sync network isolated from the show LAN, and hard-coded frame-lock across all machines.
Real-time triggers
Each room used MIDI triggers fired by show operators at specific cue points. We built a custom cue sheet in Disguise with colour-coded sections per room, so operators could see at a glance where they were across all twelve spaces simultaneously.
What we learned
Build redundancy into everything. We had a hot-spare machine configured and ready to take over in under ninety seconds. It was never needed — but knowing it was there let the operators run confidently through every session.
The show ran for sixteen weeks without a single show-stopping failure. That’s the benchmark.