Category: Insights

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.

Hiring a VJ for your event is not the same as booking a DJ. The questions are different, the red flags are different, and getting it wrong on show day is a very public failure.

What a VJ actually does

A VJ — video jockey — performs live visuals in real time, responding to the music, the room, and the energy of the crowd. It is not pressing play on a pre-rendered video file. It is a performance, and like any performance it requires skill, preparation, and equipment.

Questions to ask before you book

What software do you use? Resolume and TouchDesigner are the industry standards. Anyone using consumer tools for a professional event is a risk.

Do you have a backup rig? Hardware fails. A professional VJ brings a second output source — a laptop, a second machine, something. If they look blank when you ask this question, move on.

Can I see footage from a comparable show? A festival VJ and a corporate VJ are not the same person. Make sure the work matches the brief.

The red flags

Lowest quote. No contract. No pre-production meeting. Unwillingness to do a tech rehearsal. These are not minor concerns — they are indicators of how show day will go.

A good VJ will ask you as many questions as you ask them. They want to know the venue, the AV infrastructure, the music genre, the brand guidelines. If they’re not asking — they’re not preparing.

OmniCal is Disguise’s automated LED calibration system. When it works, it saves hours. When you don’t understand what it’s doing, it creates problems that are very hard to debug under show pressure. This guide covers the practical side — what to prepare, what to watch for, and what it won’t solve.

What OmniCal actually does

OmniCal uses a camera to capture the light output of your LED panels and generates a per-pixel correction map. It compensates for variations in brightness and colour across individual panels, cables, and tiles. The result is a visually uniform surface where the hardware alone would show seams and hotspots.

Preparation

The camera position is everything. Mount it on a stable stand at the geometric centre of the LED surface, perpendicular to the wall. Any angle introduces error that the algorithm cannot fully compensate for. Use the camera framing tool in Disguise before you start the capture sequence.

Ambient light kills calibration. Black out the room if you can. At minimum, kill all practical lighting pointed at the wall. Even indirect light from windows at the wrong time of day will skew your results.

What it won’t fix

OmniCal cannot compensate for dead pixels, failing drivers, or panels running on incompatible firmware versions. Physical faults are physical faults. Run a full panel test before you calibrate — not after.

Save your calibration files

Export and archive the calibration data after every run. If you have to strike and rebuild the wall, a saved calibration from the same panels will get you back to a known state in minutes rather than hours.

A Resolume MIDI rig that works in rehearsal and collapses in front of a crowd is worse than no rig at all. This is how I structure a performance setup that holds up under pressure.

Start with the composition, not the controller

Before you touch MIDI learn, build your composition. Know exactly which layers, clips, and effects you need to access live. Map them to logical positions in the deck — not random slots. The controller layout should mirror the composition layout.

Layer organisation

I use four layer types in every show composition: base loops (always playing), reactive layers (triggered by MIDI), FX layers (global effects bus), and emergency layers (solid colour fills for technical problems). Each gets its own colour-coded group. When something goes wrong — and something always goes wrong — you know exactly where to look.

BPM sync

If the music is live or DJ-mixed, do not rely on Resolume’s tap tempo. Use Ableton Link or MIDI clock from the audio source. A visuals rig that drifts out of sync is the most visible technical failure in live production.

Failsafes

Map a dedicated black-out button. Map a white frame. Map a solid-colour fill for every brand colour on the brief. These are not nice-to-haves — they are the things you reach for when the unexpected happens in front of three thousand people.

In-camera VFX — ICVFX — is the technology behind the LED volumes you’ve seen on major productions. It’s not a green screen replacement. It’s a fundamentally different way of making television and film, and it’s moving faster than most of the industry realises.

What it is

An XR stage is a curved LED wall — typically wrapping 270 degrees around the talent — displaying a real-time rendered background generated in Unreal Engine. A camera tracking system feeds the camera’s position and lens data to Disguise and Unreal, which shift the perspective of the rendered environment in real time to match what the physical camera sees.

The result: the background looks correct from any camera angle, reacts to the actor’s physical lighting, and can be changed between takes without moving anyone or anything.

Why broadcast is adopting it

Speed. A location shoot requires travel, logistics, permits, weather management, and continuity across multiple days. An XR stage shoot happens in a controlled environment, with repeatable lighting, in a fraction of the time. For episodic television with tight schedules and tight budgets, the economics are compelling.

The technical requirements

This is not a plug-and-play technology. You need a Disguise server running the media playback and camera tracking integration, a high-performance Unreal workstation, a camera tracking system (Mo-Sys, Stype, or similar), and LED panels with low enough latency to not introduce visible artefacts on camera. Each element has to be calibrated against the others before you roll camera.

Done well, the audience cannot tell. That’s the point.

A single Disguise showfile, deployed across multiple European retail markets simultaneously. Different room sizes, different LED configurations, different local operators — one master template that had to work everywhere.

The brief

VW’s European retail refresh required a new digital experience for flagship showrooms across six markets. Each location had a different physical footprint, but the brand experience had to be consistent. Our solution: a parametric showfile that adapted to each room’s geometry from a single source of truth.

The parametric approach

Instead of building six separate showfiles, we built one with configurable screen geometry. Each market’s local team received a configuration document — LED panel count, physical dimensions, projector throw distance — which they entered into a front-end settings interface we built in Disguise’s GUI editor. The showfile recalculated mappings automatically.

Remote deployment

We couldn’t fly to six countries for six installs. We trained local AV teams on a simplified operator interface and provided a remote access system for show-week support. Two issues required remote intervention across all six markets combined. Both were resolved in under twenty minutes.

What made it work

Pre-production. We spent three weeks in pre-vis before a single panel was hung. Every geometry variation was tested in a virtual environment before we handed off to the local teams. By the time hardware arrived on site, every question had already been answered.