During the recent National and Provincial elections in South Africa, the National Results Operation Centre (ROC) was set up as the overall monitoring environment. As a somewhat unusual video application, a complex multi-screen management solution was required to display various streams of political party results in real-time.

Paul Newman, MD at Lucidity, the principal audio visual contractor for the install, gave Sean Moss, AV head of design, the task of designing a customized solution with a Dataton WATCHOUT system as the central video control platform in the results centre. The system was required to function for the four-day duration of the national elections as a 24/7 central viewing operation.

Working with local WATCHOUT Premium Partner, PENMAC, Sean Moss from Lucidity confirmed that the high profile of this event required the system to be, firstly very robust, and, secondly, highly secure. The display layout needed to simultaneously show real-time results from all nine provinces across the country, while also displaying the cumulative national figures.

The resultant system configured by PENMAC and Lucidity consisted of an SQL database server at front of house which effectively ‘collected’ online data from the IEC central database as it was populated. This data was assembled into visual pages on a web server and then captured as live DVI feeds into WATCHOUT with each server equipped with two Datapath E2S cards. A fourth DVI input from a Screenpro switcher facilitated flexibility between laptop and live camera inputs to the system.

“Additionally, the client required that a series of dynamic geographical maps, indicating voting progress, also be displayed on the 14 by 9 meter projection surfaces,” said PENMAC’s Malcolm Finlay. “The VNC capability of WATCHOUT facilitated a further two capture channels into the overall projected composite picture. WATCHOUT, being the only system collecting these map images, was also required to serve them to the national television broadcaster via two of the multiple video output channels from the same WATCHOUT display server.”

The display park consisted of four Christie Roadster HD14KM projectors with a centre 9 by 4m six-millimeter DigiLED panel.

“The IEC was extremely impressed with the outcome, and have expressed their intention to utilize the same system for future elections,” said Malcolm Finlay.