Luxury fashion house Stella McCartney is using 83 Datapath Fx4 video wall controllers to drive its flagship stores' video walls around the globe. The 11 flagship stores, including Manhattan's Soho, London's Mayfair, LA's West Hollywood, Paris' Palais Royal, Milan, Tokyo, Shanghai and Beijing, will drive mosaic displays promoting its latest collection - as well as delivering all-important environmental messaging to customers and passers-by.

The award-winning Fx4 is a multi-faceted stand-alone display controller that supports a choice of inputs, high bandwidth loop-through and four genlocked outputs in either DisplayPort or HDMI interface protocols, offering a myriad of possibilities for end users with flexibility for the most creative and impactful displays.

The challenge

To capture the attention of customers as they pass a store, Stella McCartney commissioned specialist integrator and digital content developer Freehand to provide digital signage displays at 11 key retail outlets in Europe, the US and Asia.

Freehand has been designing and managing digital signage, visual technologies and AV projects in Stella McCartney stores for a number of years. For this latest project, the McCartney team wanted to invest in digital signage that would not only reflect the brand's modern and responsible values, but have global continuity.

The solution

Taking a new approach to the standard 2 x 2 or 3 x 3 video walls, a combination of different display sizes were configured into a mosaic formation. In total, the 11 video walls spread across three continents comprise 59 displays from LG's SM5KD range. The screens range in size from 32 to 55", and are hung in both landscape and portrait orientations.

Chosen for their high bright design at 450 nits, the screens perform well in the high ambient light environment of the store windows. Importantly, a total of 83 Datapath Fx4-H video wall processors drive the screens and link to 22 media players from BrightSign.

Among many unique features, the high-performance Datapath Fx4 is capable of source capture at up to 4k at 60 fps, or UHD 2160p at 30fps. Developed for true stand-alone operation, the non-volatile operation of the Fx4 can adapt to input changes by automatically adjusting all scale factors, while the intuitive user interface allows users to determine which input is used.

The result

With the Stella McCartney project now complete, the mosaic screen tiling creates a stunning effect. The Datapath Fx4 controllers and BrightSign media players work in unison, allowing Freehand to continue maintaining the screens globally, remotely and with ease.

The high capability of the Fx4 offers many advantages for users such as Freehand. For instance, each output monitor can take its input from any region of the input image as all of the required cropping, scaling, rotation and frame-rate conversion is handled by the Fx4 hardware. These regions can overlap to permit any output to replicate another, or can be configured to support any creative splice of the source material. This functionality allows the support of many non-rectangular screen arrangements, as well as any mix of monitor orientations, permitting users to create an almost unlimited multi-monitor canvas. HDCP content is supported on all inputs and output.