RADlite chosen for Ronan Keating tour

Projected Image Digital have sold a second RADlite digital media server system to leading live video specialists XL Video, the video hardware suppliers for the final UK leg of Ronan Keating’s '2003 Destination' world tour.
The RADlite was specified by lighting designer Peter Barnes. Barnes has been a great advocate and experimentalist with the RADlite system and its impressive effects potential, since first using it last year. Barnes has integrated RADlite on Blue, Will & Gareth, S-Club and Blazin’ Squad tours.
Stage and video design for the final legs of the tour - that started back in 2002 - was a collaboration between Barnes and production manager Iain Whitehead of Production North. It consisted of five vertical upstage panels of Westerhagen low resolution LED screen, used as an elegant architectural framing for the performance area. It also allowed them to have another layer of visuals behind the screens – in the form of a starcloth.
RADlite graphics effects work particularly well on this type of low-res surface. Barnes and tour lighting director Graham Feast defined the show’s visual aesthetic by using the RADlite as a lighting effect.
With the application of many different RADlite looks, the LED panels were utilised in a myriad of ways - as dramatic blocks of colour, as scene setters, for movement, as abstract swirling wallpaper and as light sources in their own right, complimented by the regular lighting fixtures on the rig.
The RADlite effects were sometimes confined to the individual panels, other times they spilled and worked in unison across all five panels.
Barnes also created some special new playback footage for this leg of the tour, stored on the RADlite hard drive, and then treated and manipulated by the system to produce abstracted but vaguely recognisable scenes like trees and landscapes. Other footage included spectacular literal images like clouds, given an almost trippy appearance when beamed onto the Westerhagen panels.
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