Brompton Processing And Absen LED Power 50th Olivier Awards At Royal Albert Hall

Marking its 50th anniversary, the ceremony at London's Royal Albert Hall celebrated standout theatre from the past year and across the past five decades. Blue-i's LED workflow, driven by Brompton processing, supported both the in-venue staging and the broadcast.

Into The Woods and Paddington The Musical, both featuring Brompton processing, topped the nominations with 11 apiece, with Paddington The Musical winning seven awards, including Best New Musical.

The LED design was split into seven elements: a central flown 16:9 screen for VT packages and scenic content behind performances, plus six 'poster' screens built into the set that carried scenic material and images spotlighting nominees and winners.

For the main screen, Blue-i used two Tessera 4K SX40 LED processors and two Tessera XD 10G data distribution units, mirrored by another pair of SX40s and XDs for the poster screens.

Blue-i also introduced Absen's latest Saturn 2.6mm LED panels, selected to run on Brompton processing. The new tiles weigh less than half the previous generation, easing demands on automation and rigging within the Royal Albert Hall.

"Productions of this scale demand complete confidence in every element of the LED workflow," says Darren Jackson, Business Development Manager (UK and Ireland) at Absen Europe. "The combination of Absen Saturn panels and Brompton processing gave Blue-i the performance, colour fidelity and reliability needed for a live prime-time broadcast, and we're proud to have contributed to such a landmark celebration of British theatre."

With live broadcast timings leaving little margin for error, redundancy was paramount. "Being a live broadcast, project timings are really tight, so ensuring we could load in quickly and have a rock solid system with full redundancy was very important," Jeffs explains. "The SX40 and XD combination allowed for multiple layers of redundancy, which makes it one of our favourite Brompton features."

Ultra-low latency on the Tessera platform cut end-to-end delay across the processor to a single frame—crucial given the signal's journey through the outside broadcast chain—while genlock synchronised the entire LED system to house sync to guard against on-camera artefacts.

Brompton's fine colour control, notably ChromaTune with its 14-way colour corrector, helped match the desired on-camera look. "Having the fine colour controls was heavily used to work with the broadcast engineers to get things looking just right on camera," Jeffs says. "The different levels of control really helped dial things in quickly."

Stacking enabled instant, system-wide adjustments by propagating changes across all four SX40 units, and Frame Store added resilience by allowing snapshot playback as a contingency during the live transmission.

"It's always a highlight of the year, celebrating the success of UK theatre, and it's such a privilege to be a part of that," Jeffs reflects. "For me it's special, as it's one of the few shows for which I'm still in the hot seat looking after programming."

"The Olivier Awards' return to prime-time TV is a landmark occasion," concludes Patrick Goodden, Technical Sales Manager (UK and Ireland) at Brompton Technology. "Live broadcast is one of the most demanding environments for LED processing, with latency, redundancy and colour accuracy requiring no margin for error. The fact that Blue-i have built their entire workflow around the SX40 is a real testament to what the platform can deliver; it's a privilege to support them in making something this special look its very best."

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