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Eight towers, 24 LED screens and PIXERA power Metallica’s most immersive tour to date Inside Metallica’s v
M etallica’s M72 World Tour isn’t just a celebration of their four-decade legacy, it’s a masterclass in how to merge rock spectacle with cutting-edge technology. With a groundbreaking in-the-round stage and the audacious ‘no repeat weekend’ format, the band has been pushing creative limits since the tour kicked off in 2023. But behind the towering LED visuals and production lies a quiet revolution: the adoption of the PIXERA media server system from AV Stumpfl. Creative director and production designer Dan Braun envisioned something massive: eight 100ft-tall towers, each outfitted with three 50x30ft LED screens. That’s 24 discrete surfaces forming a panoramic canvas for a live audience of up to 80,000 people a night. To bring that vision to life, Metallica needed a system that could match the scale of their creativity. That’s where PIXERA came in. The tour’s switch to PIXERA began with a live test at the Soundstorm Festival in 2023, and the results were so promising that the system became the backbone of the entire M72 video infrastructure. “PIXERA’s rendering capabilities, especially for Notch effects, are unmatched,” says Tom Denney, media server engineer for the tour. “These boxes handle up to two simultaneous Notch effects without dropping frames, which is critical for our 38-camera set-up and dynamic visuals.” David Leonard, the tour’s media server programmer and operator, highlights the
“The system lets us play around with perspective, wrapping visuals across multiple towers or isolating them for impact”
system’s stability and interface as a game changer. “PIXERA version 25 has been great. I’ve had zero drops or restarts. The layer-based interface and tools like layer referencing make it easy to handle 50 different screen mappings per show, keeping the visuals both fresh and immersive.” Leonard’s nightly task isn’t small. Each Metallica show’s setlist is curated from a vast discography and finalised just before the band hits the stage. That means programming a timeline for each song and building out a full cue list just in time for the lights to go down. The backbone of the set-up is a rig of eight PIXERA servers – four main and four redundant – which ensures true one-to-one failover. “The band and creative team prioritise reliability, and PIXERA delivers,” Denney notes. “Each
Instead of pre-rendering content, PIXERA enables real-time visual storytelling
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