A production of “Harry Potter: A Yule Ball Celebration,” a live re-creation of a gala that takes place in the film “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” made its Houston debut at the recently re-opened Paraiso Maravilla venue in November of last year and employed RF Venue antennas to help prevent RF issues with the dozen Shure UR4D wireless microphone channels provided by the event’s AVL producer, Houston-based GTX Productions.
“The action was rather spread out, over three areas: mainly the lobby and the ballroom, as well as the hallways leading to the green rooms for the actors,” explains Darwin Zelaya, audio engineer at GTX. “The actors made their entrance on the staircases and then spent about 40 minutes roaming the floors, talking to visitors and doing things like teaching magic tricks, really helping everyone get into the Harry Potter experience. Then the MCs came out to start the dance, which is the focus of the event. It was a lot of action, and we did between two and five shows a day, and each one had to be perfect.”
Zelaya notes that he had initially used a pair of antennas from another company during setup and rehearsal, awaiting the arrival of the RF Venue Diversity Fin antennas, and found that he was getting dropouts, especially in the hallway leading to the green rooms.
“Using just one of the D-Fin antennas I was able to get perfect wireless performance, far better than using two of the other ones,” says Zelaya, who had only used RF Venue systems once before. He then deployed two Diversity Fin antennas, one in the ballroom and one on the ceiling of the lobby, for redundancy. “With two, the coverage was absolutely perfect,” he adds. “I used the 4ZONE to create the two zones we needed, between the lobby and the ballroom, and I was able to reach all the way to the back of the building and to the green rooms from my mix position, which is where we also had the DISTRO4 Antenna Distribution System located. It all worked perfectly, with zero dropouts.”
GTX audio technician Alex Perez concludes, “RF Venue works as intended, every single time. That’s important for a company like ours, because for an event like this, which has a very specific look to it, we have to keep the system out of sight. The D-Fin lets us cover very large areas with a single antenna and still completely avoid dropouts. It also lets us achieve a very clean look and is very simple and intuitive to use. RF Venue is a winner.”
