The P.A. People winners at the 2010 Australian Event Awards.  

The PA People are honoured to have been selected as a finalist in the categories of Most Innovative Use of Technology and Best Product or Service for this years Australian Event Awards.
The P.A. People joined other finalists for 2010 Australian Event Awards night held on October 8th at Sydney Olympic Park. During the evening The P.A. People took top honours in two catagoies for Most Innovative Use of Technology, based on the EYEcue camera systems deployed for the Sydney Festival 'Festival First Night' and 'AR Rahman' events earlier this year, as well as Best Product or Service for SPLnet environmental sound monitoring system .   
The Australian Event Awards is the national program to reward excellence and innovation across the entire Australian Events Industry and is the only opportunity for Australian events, event managers, products and service providers to be nationally recognised for their achievements regardless of event type, size, geographic location or association membership.

Most Innovative Use of Technology - The PA People for their work on Sydney Festival

2010 saw the first use of The P.A. People’s EYEcue camera system at the Sydney Festival. Three systems were deployed throughout January / February. 
 
This year Sydney Festival called upon The PA People to extend the coverage of their EYEcue Surveillance system in two main areas – the deployment of cameras throughout the Macquarie Precinct areas of Sydney CBD for Festival First Night, and the integration of the EYEcue system with the NSW Police Operation Centre in Surry Hills for both Festival First Night and the AR Rahman concert in Parramatta Park.

The Eyecue camera system is an IP based CCTV/Surveillance system designed for event crowd control and performance monitoring applications. It consists of a number of networked cameras, a central server system with the capacity to record video, a multi-screen video wall for control room applications and workstations and monitors for user interaction.

Best Product or Service - SPLnet the PA People 

At a hardware level the system comprises a number of discrete elements all interconnected using a range of network technologies:

 
• A number of perimeter monitoring instruments, solar powered to provide flexibility of deployment, each connected to a central logging server via a private Telstra 3G network. Each perimeter system is able to log measurements and record audio for any number of SPL parameters including 1/3 octave analysis of the audio, as well as provide real time measurements and streaming audio to the control station.
 
• A number of local Stage monitoring instruments each connected via an IP network to both a local Stage based PC monitoring PC (for the local audio operator), and to the control station over a Wide Area Network. The WAN topology would depend on the actual event and what other networked services are being deployed. The infra structure would typically be a mix of copper, fibre, WiFi, and both RF and Free Space Optical links.
 
• A control station capable of monitoring each of the perimeter stations and of setting the thresholds for the Stage systems. The control station is connected to both the 3G network and the local WAN, and enables one engineer to both monitor and control the compliance for the event.
Custom software applications are th
en used on both the control station and on the stage PC’s to provide SPL thresholds and SPL levels to the audio operators along with text based messaging for two way communications between engineers.