“Every country was just in awe of what we’d done on stage” For many years now, Barco has been a trusted technical partner to the Eurovision Song Contest, the world’s largest music competition. None of its contributions, however, can top that of the 2013 edition. “We wanted to take Eurovision to the next level,” explained Ola Melzig, Technical Director of the team. “And create a more intimate setting, with nothing but projection.”
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The challenge was big. As an official technical event partner, Barco had to find ways to project onto a large (40 x 8), curved wall and ensure enough light to compete with 500+ moving lights. The HDQ-2K40 projector proved to be just the ticket. “It is very silent and punches out 40,000 lumens,” said Barco’s Abbe Westerlundh, who supervised the technical set-up.

Barco used no less than 60 Barco projectors, including 28 high-brightness HDQ-2K40 projectors, delivered by its rental partner Mediatec. 13 of the HDQ-2K40s were blended and warped into a spectacular back wall. Content was fed from Green Hippo servers, via a Barco Encore system contacting five video processors, a Matrix PRO DVI 8 x8, a Matrix PRO II SDI 3G and a large controller. The proprietary BarcoLink technology, for its part, guaranteed swift, robust and cost-effective signal distribution between the projectors and image processors.

“In fact, we had to break all the rules of projection to achieve our lofty objective,” Westerlundh continued. Yet the end result was well worth it. Melzig: “Every single country was just in awe of what we’d done on stage.”