Our Showserver system allows one of Italy’s most beloved football stadiums to control a cutting edge light show, all from one touchscreen PC.
Apollo Control System • Integration • Programming
As the largest football stadium in Italy, the San Siro is one of the most instantly recognisable sporting arenas in the world. Just one look at the famous red scaffolding and you can tell that it’s a spiritual home of success and ambition. As such, its operators wanted a lighting system that matched the magnitude of the famous stadium.
Requiring a comprehensive understanding of hybrid lighting control systems, Stadium FX was brought in by Musco Sports Lighting to provide a Pharos/Cueserver hybrid control system. The system would need to be fully controllable from our in-house proprietary Apollo UI, providing both basic level and housekeeping level controls, as well as recording advanced AV sequences with balanced audio and SMPTE timecode.
When working on installs away from the UK, we feel it’s important to provide immediate and cost-effective service to each end client. For that reason, we partnered with one of Sam MacLaren’s long time collaborators in Milan (Jordan Babev of Blearred Design) to deliver programming and services to both AC Milan and Inter Milan throughout the project.
We supplied our ever-popular “Guest Input Box” to the San Siro, enabling the system to connect to 3rd party lighting consoles and produce extra or last-minute light shows through direct DMX connection rather than a direct IT network link. Not only does this keep stadium management and IT departments happy, it consolidates the disparate nature of stadia size lighting data distribution and patching into a one-line soft patch.
AC Milan, in particular, embraced the new system, throwing themselves into pre-match light shows, team sheet effects and a half time DJ mix, all of which went down extremely well with the “Rossoneri”, adding extra firepower to their flares, bangers and smoke grenades. Both AC Milan and Internazionale were given individual logins to the Apollo UI system, with a third login granted to the stadium itself.
Where possible, we also take control of power switching and can save literally hundreds, if not thousands, of upkeep costs over a season in terms of grass cutting and maintenance. This is the case at San Siro, where we developed an ‘eco’ mode which operates with only a quarter of the field-of-play lights and drivers on.
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