CHIMELONG WILD ANIMAL PARK

Theme parks worldwide have been convinced for some years that Merging Technologies’ Ovation Media Server and Sequencer is the key to unlocking creativity and enhancing the visitor experience. The latest venue to embrace the technology is the Guanzhou Chimelong Wild Animal Park in China. This park had its opening ceremony on January 14th 2020, and features an ambitious installation completed by local Merging Partners, Dreamula. In a matter of weeks, the park was forced to close because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but has recently reopened. The park is a night safari theme with around 45 different zones relating to different animals, such as the Panda Park, Swan Lake, Giraffe Playground and so on. Each zone has its own sound system, projectors, lasers and LED screens

all connected via Ethernet to a central control room where the Ovation server and Medialon Show Controller are located. Each zone has completely different requirements according to its individual theme and that adds to the complexity. The audio network is a complete Dante solution and the Ovation server has Yamaha AIC128-D Dante accelerator cards installed with each one providing 128 I/O at 48kHz. All audio media files are stored on Ovation along with the cue data. Ovation uses its powerful virtual mixing console to send approximately 70 audio signals to 41 amplifiers in the 45 zones. Every zone’s timeline and volume can be controlled independently or grouped in the Ovation mixer. The entire audio routing map is set up and stored in a Symetrix Radius NX 4X4 audio processor. Ovation uses ASCII commands to

communicate with the Symetrix so that another routing map can be loaded to achieve a different playback mode or public announcement mode. All the amplifiers throughout the park are network controlled from Ovation and this is done by issuing UDP and HEX commands. Ovation can remotely control the amplifiers independently or globally, instructing them to switch on or go to standby. This can be done by time control or manually, and the status of each amplifier is reported back, not only whether it is active or in standby, but also the running time since the last boot up. Most audio cues are triggered by Ovation and make extensive use of the conditional rules feature which makes the product exceptionly powerful. Some other audio cues are interactive and need to synchronise projectors,

lights and lasers, and in this case, timecode accuracy is not necessary. This equipment is controlled by the Medialon using DMX and ArtNet protocol. Ovation communicates with Medialon using HEX through TCP, so when the cue is triggered, Ovation feeds the information back to Medialon as to whether the cue was successfully triggered or not and the user has an indicator light to confirm the status. Dreamula Project Manager, Zhu Jie, reflected on the installation and commented: “We cannot imagine how this could be achieved without Ovation. The combination of its flexibility and power cannot be matched and it is really easy to integrate with other equipment, even the Dante network.” www.merging.com

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