Hair care company Paul Mitchell recently drew together the top dealers and salon stylists for a week-long meeting in Las Vegas. The Paul Mitchell Signature Gallery 2004 at the Mandalay Bay featured business meetings in the morning, with a runway show of exotic hair-styles in the afternoon. Through it all, a High End Systems Catalyst Pro v3.0 Media Server added hair-raising highlights to the corporate coiffure.

LD JJ Wulf specified Catalyst along with 48 High End Systems Studio Spot CMY automated luminaires and a Flying Pig Systems Wholehog® II console for control. PRG provided the production gear.

“We had 24 of the 4-k projectors using both Catalyst outputs. [Note: the the Sanyo PLC-XP46 projectors used in this event are the same projectors used in the DL1 Digital Light fixture.]," explains Wulf. "I also controlled the video switching through Catalyst, so I could switch to a third image when the cameras or video crew had a good shot. The video company was only responsible for four screens above the stage.”

Wulf is familiar with Catalyst, as he uses it twice a month on a range of corporate shows, he says. For this event, Catalyst content came from the video crew and from Paul Mitchell’s graphics department. “I took the new product logos, which were static images, and put backgrounds behind them. Then we animated them through Catalyst," Wulf explains. "I could change the color, layer them, tile them, stack them. I basically used them like gobos. There was no way the video crew could do what I could do with the images, especially on the fly.”