Dead & Company
Dead Forever at Sphere
WEKA Teams with Dead & Company to Power Its Most Ambitious and
Immersive Concert Experience Ever
Forever Pushing Boundaries
The Grateful Dead has pushed boundaries since the beginning, a legacy that has continued under the Dead & Company moniker. Deadheads everywhere rejoiced when Dead & Company announced the band would return to the stage with its Dead Forever residency at Sphere in 2024. Developing the technology stack that would underpin what Rolling Stone magazine called “the most dazzling visual show in Grateful Dead history” was no easy feat.
For bands performing at Sphere, the venue pushes the boundaries of what they’ve encountered before and presents unprecedented data management, performance, and scale challenges.
A hallmark of Dead & Company’s concert experiences is its immersive three-dimensional video content, which required significant performance to render and playback at scale for Sphere. The band was also adamant that it would preserve the improvisational nature of its performances, a choice that would further push the limits of the Forever Dead production team’s capabilities. Without time codes for their set, Dead & Company’s creative team had to prepare and manage enough video to transition when necessary during the performance while still maintaining its organic feel.
The Solution
To create a show that could run and dazzle at scale on Sphere’s unprecedented canvas, the production team knew they had to bring the right tools to the project, or it would be insurmountable. Producing an experience that ran on a 1.5PB dataset, rendering the enormous files required for high-quality 3D images, and preserving the flexibility necessary for the flow of an experiential show built around musical jam sets without a predetermined order or time limits required a flexible, high-performance technology platform.
Dead & Company selected WEKA as its Official Technology Partner for its Forever Dead residency at Sphere, using its maintenance-free, plug and play WEKApod™ Data Platform Appliance solution to power the show. Leveraging WEKA Data Platform software, the WEKApod appliance effortlessly optimized the processing of enormous datasets at lightning speed, making it a critical component in supporting the show’s pre-production workflow.
“Technology is at its best when it gets out of the way of the creative process, and that is exactly what WEKA did for us at Sphere.”
A Wildly Immersive Experience Powered by WEKA
Working with WEKA, Dead & Company achieved new creative heights with an immersive, multi-dimensional, globally praised extravaganza. More importantly, a band renowned for creating unforgettable experiences for its beloved community of fans combined the best of the Grateful Dead’s decades-long musical legacy with bleeding-edge technology to delight over 20,000 ‘Deadheads’ each night.
The WEKA Data Platform enabled Dead & Company’s production team to render impossibly large video files in record time, unleashing their creativity as they embraced the full scale of the Sphere’s immersive venue to bring their music to life for fans. The WEKApod appliance also functioned as the data hub for the entire project, supporting the post-production pipeline, storing camera records and videos, and providing a centralized system for distributing the live show’s D3 media playback servers.
“WEKA made working with what were once unthinkable resolutions and file sizes a near-effortless experience. No other solution could prove to be as fast, flexible or reliable,”
Outcomes with WEKA
1.5 PB
data under management
With WEKA, Dead & Company could focus on the show’s creative elements rather than the technical logistics of the rendering and delivery pipeline for an enormous data set.
90 TB
data per show
WEKA helped to supercharge the production team’s creativity by enabling its artists to render and encode in minutes instead of hours, supporting a more iterative creative process.
100 GB
network at line-rate speed
WEKA made it possible for Dead & Company to push content out across a 100 gig network at actual 100 gig speeds, delivering very big files very fast.
Deadhead’s Delight: A Wildly Immersive Experience Powered by WEKA
WEKA Teams with Dead & Company to Power Its Most Ambitious and Immersive Concert Experience Ever.
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