Full Boar 4 helps map Central AV’s future

Central Audio Visual are headquartered in Thebarton, a stone’s throw from Adelaide’s CBD. A family owned and operated AV company, they work in many major venues in SA, and pride themselves on providing the best gear, technicians and customer service to the corporate, events, exhibitions, broadcast, and sporting markets. Being the in-house AV providers at prestigious venues like Adelaide Oval, Central AV needed lighting control that’s fast, flexible, robust, and reliable, which is why they’ve added a High End Systems Full Boar 4 to their existing Hog 4 inventory.

Central’s in-house lighting tech Benny Sigal is a long-term Hog user, harking back to the days of the Full Boar 3. “The Hog platform is all about the ease of patching,” observes Benny. “It’s really quick and easy to repatch from one show to the next. I love the Hog’s speed and flexibility in repatching a show; jig a few user numbers around, get up and running, and make changes very quickly. ‘The power is in the patching’ is what I’ve always said, and I find some of the other lighting control systems are a bit long-winded when it comes to that task.”

Already running two Road Hogs regularly, the Full Boar 4 has been added to not only handle the bigger gigs but expand Central AV’s offerings to its clients. “We needed something with the capabilities of the Full Boar 4 to expand outputs, and increase our processing power,” explains Benny. “We’ve outgrown the eight Universes on the Road Hogs. With the Full Boar 4 we can utilise the four DMX onboard and expand to twelve via ArtNet. As a company, Central AV are running a lot of LED screens, so the eye-candy and onboard pixel mapping was a big factor in choosing the Road Hog 4 and expansion wing. We have a dedicated visualiser suite in our office running a couple of big screens, the Full Boar 4 lives in there to do pre-visualisation for clients with our LightConverse Media v59 software. We’re looking at acquiring some Green Hippo media servers in the near future.”

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High End Systems’ Full Boar 4 packs the features and layout of the flagship Hog 4 into a more compact package. Sporting two 15.6-inch multi-touch monitors and two additional video outputs, its local output processing supports 12 universes (6144 output channels) on a combination of Ethernet and 5-pin XLR connections. If needs be, Central AV could run unlimited DMX-512, Art-Net and E1.31/sACN universes via HogNet-connected DP8K processors, meaning no mapping gig is beyond them.

Benny remembers running Road Hog 3s back in the days before Lexair became the distributor for High End Systems in Australia and New Zealand. “I’ve always loved my Hogs, but back then, there was no technical support in this country. When Lexair took the brand on-board, everything just became so much easier. Whenever we’ve had any issues regarding tech or service, Lexair has been there in a flash, and sometimes been on the phone to the USA at all times of the night. They’ve always looked after us, and even loaned us consoles as need be.”