Built World’s Largest LED Screen, 4pcs 8K Resolution+Naked-eye 3D
The world’s largest LED screen was unveiled at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympics. It is the main stage of the opening ceremony in the National Stadium, also known as the Bird’s Nest. This huge LED screen covers 11,500 square meters and uses more than 40,000 LED modules.

The never-before-seen 4pcs 8K Ultra High Definition (UHD) displays on the stage of the opening ceremony captured the world’s attention. Not only is it the largest in the world, but it also uses cutting-edge technology.

The opening ceremony adopted 5G+4K/8K+AI technology as the main strategy. It used 50-frame resolution video material on the screen for the first time, which greatly tested the clarity and fluency of the screen.

The weather also puts forward higher requirements for the waterproof, snowproof, and low-temperature resistance of the screen.

FLOOR SCREEN MAIN SPECS:

Size: length 156 meters, width 76 meters;
Pixel pitch: 5mm (actually about P9.64, because of quad pixel backup);
Resolution: 14880×7248, divided into 4pcs 8K playback areas;
Cabinet: 500*500mm, 46,504pcs
Total area: 10393㎡,
Contrast: support 100000:1 contrast ratio,
Refresh rate: 3840Hz, can present naked-eye 3D visual effects;
Stability: dual power supply, system quad backup, pixel quad backup;
Protection: IP66
Mask: Anti-glare, anti-moiré, anti-slip fogging mask
Load-bearing: more than 500kg/㎡;
Splicing gap: The circular cover plate and lift table in the center adopts a special production process, and the gap of the center circular is 10~28mm, which ensures the overall consistency of the picture;

Beijing Winter Olympics Ceremony LED screens
Customized Creative LED Screens
LED Waterfall Screen (Merging into Floor Screen)

The ice waterfall screen of a total area of 1200 square meters is seamlessly spliced with thousands of square meters of LED floor tiles on the main stage.

With the help of 3D visual effects, the entire space creates an immersive performance space.

WATERFALL SCREEN MAIN SPECS:

Size: 20 meters wide and 58 meters high;
Pixel pitch: The calculated pitch is 7.9mm;
Resolution: 2560×7328;
Cabinet: The 14-meter-wide and 7-meter-high lift screen for the athlete’s passage adopts a carbon fiber screen, and the rest of the ice waterfall screen adopts a grille screen with lightweight aluminum profile material;
Protection class: IP65 (front+back); overall glue-filled;
Grille screen transparency: 70%
The ink droplets immediately melted into the river and sea, rolling out a picture of a Chinese waterfall.

Waterfall led screen in beijing olympics ceremony
Ice Cube (Five-sided Screen)

As the tide of the Yellow River receded, the ink and water condensed into ice in the air, and a huge ice cube rose from the ground.

The water ripples are looming, and this 5-sided ice cube screen slowly rises, containing the spiritual core of the East.

The naked-eye 3D visual effect on the ice cube provides the audience with a realistic visual experience.

Spatial control technology facilitates the precise presentation of ice cubes. According to CALT (China Academy of Launch Vehicle), this lifting platform weighs about 400 tons that can lift a payload of 180 tons, and can strictly control the position of ice cubes within ±1 mm of 10 meters above the ground.

ICE CUBE SCREEN MAIN SPECS:

Size: Ice cube with a length of 22 meters, a width of 7 meters and a height of 10 meters,
Glasses-free 3D display: a five-sided naked-eye 3D display device;
Cabinet: carbon fiber structure design,
Display unit weight: only 8 kg/㎡, which makes it possible to quickly lift the ice cube.
Total weight: the total weight is 400 tons, the lifting weight is 180 tons, the lifting load is 8 times that of the general theater large-scale lifting platform
Ice cube led screen in Beijing Olympics Ceremony

LED Ring

As the core of the ceremony, the Olympic rings rose steadily to 13 meters in 43 seconds.

The inside of the ring is composed of a 360° LED creative screen without dead ends, which can display any image. The outermost diffuser plate ensures a clear and soft visual effect.

The Olympic rings are 19 meters long, 8.75 meters high, weigh about 3 tons, and have a thickness of only 350 mm. The paper-thin rings can withstand strong winds of level 6.

CALT developers say the rings have a special aluminum alloy truss structure that makes them as light and strong as Chinese rockets.

Like the Long March 2F manned carrier rocket, the ring is also designed with redundancy backup. The abnormal parts can be replaced immediately without any delay.

OLYMPIC RING SCREEN MAIN SPECS:

Size: 19 meters long, 8.75 meters high, and only 35 cm thick;
Structure: The interior is composed of 360° LED special-shaped screen without dead angle; large span and low stiffness;
Stability: Dual screen redundancy, backup system and power supply without delay switching;
Installation structure: aluminum alloy truss structure, both strong and light, stably rises to 13 meters in 43 seconds;
Mask: The outer diffuser panel guarantees a clear and soft visual effect.

LED Ring in Beijing Winter Olympics Ceremony
Snowflake Main Torch

Snowflake’s main torch adopts a single-pixel controllable special-shaped display product like LED mesh light.

It perfectly shows the line sense and greasy picture of snowflakes, and realizes the idea of “sparkling like a diamond” of the torch platform.

Size: The diameter of the main torch stage is 14.89 meters, which consists of 96 small snowflakes and 6 olive branch-shaped LED double-sided screens;
Structure: Double-sided hollow design, embedded with more than 550,000 LED lamp beads.
Control mode: driver chip single-channel independent control;
Control system: A synchronous/asynchronous compatible signal system is adopted. Asynchronous centralized control can quickly deliver large-scale video content in a very short period of time, and synchronous centralized control ensures that 102 double-sided screens can respond in milliseconds;
Stability: The highly redundant control system with “loop” backup ensures the ultra-high reliability of the torch broadcast control system.

Naked-eye 3D Display Technology

The actual video resolution of the ground LED screen is 14880×7248, up to 4pcs 8K resolutions, which perfectly presents the naked-eye 3D effect.

The playback of each Winter Olympics on the ice cube and the Olympic rings breaking from the ice are very eye-catching, that all used naked-eye 3D display technology.

Naked-eye-LED-screen-technology-in-Beijing-Olympics-Ceremony
Photo: Getty Images
The engraving vision is produced by the combination of laser and IceCube screen 3D visual effects.
When the five-ring LED screen was unveiled, the laser on the 4th floor of the grandstand irradiated the Ice Cube to “carve” the Ice Cube.

Olympics rings LED screen
XR Technology on LED Display

Image capture
On-site industrial cameras can capture images with very low latency.

The camera is connected to the computer room through the optical fiber. The computer room with artificial intelligence and vision processing functions can remotely control the activation and focusing of the camera.

Image Processing
Behind each camera is a server.

The camera’s signal is connected to a main and a standby server system through optical fiber, and they process the signal just captured by the camera.
The server processes, identify the coordinates of each child on the field and extracts them accurately. This is a signal that computer vision and artificial intelligence process later.

This process transmits the coordinates of the physical world to the digital world, and the rendering server will render beautiful patterns under each child’s feet according to the coordinates of the digital world.

Real-time rendering
Live effects are generated in full real-time.

This rendering system is called AI real-time special effects system.
It first obtains real-time data from an artificial intelligence-based motion capture system.
Then, these data transmit to our real-time rendering system, which will render the corresponding effect according to its position, and finally get the video picture effect, and then give it to the LED control system, and the LED control system will finally present the effect to the ground screen.

Because the rendering effect also has position coordinates. It can be accurately presented under the feet of each actor, and some details can be adjusted and changed according to the actor’s movements.

Powerful Playback Server System
How to display videos on ultra-high resolution LED screens simultaneously?
All the LED screens used in the opening and closing ceremonies of the Winter Olympics are greater than 16K, and the frame rate of the video material is 50Hz.

The resolution of the LED screen for the Winter Olympics is large and the frame rate is high, which also puts forward extremely high requirements for the playback control system.

Hirender Technology adopts 1 control server and 7 display servers as a group, each display server outputs 4 channels of 3840×2160@50Hz signals, and a total of 27 channels of 3840×2160@50Hz signals are output. Working closely with the LED screen system (Novastar), it achieves perfect playback with high resolution and high frame rate.

With such a large-scale ultra-high-resolution high-frame-rate screen, there is one thing that cannot be ignored, that is, the synchronous playback of more than 27 channels of 4K50Hz video signals.

In order to avoid screen tearing caused by dropped frames, the Hirender media servers are equipped with NVIDIA Quadro synchronization cards.

Realize the same clock source of the server and other devices on the system chain, which ensures the smooth and uniform effect of the final playback picture.

Even if the fast-moving picture content is displayed during the performance, it can achieve precise synchronization, and successfully completed the LED playback work for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Winter Olympics.

Dual system backup
In order to avoid risks to the greatest extent, Lanjing Technology uses the main and standby servers as double insurance. The 16 servers adopt the mode of 8 active and 8 standby. Both active and standby 2 console servers can perform control work.

If there is a problem with the main console Immediately switch to the standby control terminal for output control, and the picture will not be lost on the large screen, ensuring that the performance can continue smoothly without being affected, minimizing risks。

Suitable encoding format
Due to the large screen resolution and high frame rate of the opening and closing ceremonies, the material files used are large in size and in large numbers, which puts a lot of pressure on storage, replacement, and transmission.

In the early system design, a technical solution for HVC video coding, which was independently developed by Hirender Technology and exclusively for the performance industry, was proposed at the beginning. Compared with HAP encoding, HVC video encoding has higher image quality and is more suitable for smooth playback of super-resolution video materials, and also supports functions such as forward playback, reverse playback, and fast positioning.

A large amount of video material needs to be saved on the server for the director team to use and play and replace in the software. In order to ensure the safety of the final performance, the H.265 encoding with a smaller footprint was finally chosen.

Perfect presentation of the real-time tracking effect
During the opening ceremony, the actors of the “Salute to the People” program drew the words “faster, higher, stronger, and more united” on the stage with roller skating. Hundreds of children with peace doves in the “Snowflake” program graced the stage. When dancing, the snowflakes on the floor screen followed the dancing children, accompanying the children to move freely on the stage… The tacit cooperation between people and artistic effects has become the key to the success of the performance.

Behind the performance is the support of Intel’s 3DAT real-time tracking technology. The camera tracks the position of the actors on the stage in real-time, and uses artificial intelligence visual algorithms to calculate and render the real-time picture on the stage, creating a picture that follows people walking. However, the picture output by the rendering machine needs to be collected and played through the playback control system.

Hirender supports the processing of footage before output. Use the Magewell 4K capture card to capture the real-time rendered image, input it into the media server to adjust the shape to match the ground screen, adjust the image resolution to achieve point-to-point playback effect, and finally capture it synchronously by Hirender to the media server, ensuring accurate and efficient processing.

Accurate Timecode and Output Control
In addition to the ice waterfall and the ground screen, Hirender is also responsible for the control and playback of the north and south stand screens, the Olympics rings and the torch at the opening and closing ceremonies, and the main and backup servers are also set up to make the performance stable and controllable and centrally managed.

The laser and other equipment used in the opening ceremony are responsible for sending the time code by Hirender, which controls the start and duration of the performance to match the real-time image content of Ice Cube to perform laser engraving effects.

Chinese Brand LED Display and Key Materials
The opening ceremony stage is composed of ground screens, ice cubes, ice waterfalls, and north and south stand screens, all of which use LED displays, with a total area of about 14,500 square meters. The total area of LED screens provided by Leyard is about 10,000 square meters, accounting for about 70% of the area.

The ground screen of the opening ceremony is the largest LED screen in the world, with an area of about 11,500 square meters. Leyard provides more than 7,000 square meters, and BOE provides about 4,500 square meters. Ledman is involved in the creation of the Olympics rings.

For the ground screen, Ice Cube adopts Nationstar Optoelectronics FM1921 lamp beads, while the Olympic Rings adopts Nationstar Optoelectronics outdoor high-end RS2727 lamp beads.

This successful Olympic opening ceremony has fully proved the mature and reliable technology and products of Chinese LED display manufacturers and raw material suppliers.

Please click the below to watch part of the Spectacular Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony.