Background
Situated in southeast Atlanta, Georgia, United States. The Ron Clark Academy is a non-profit middle school, housed in a renovated red brick warehouse. The Academy has received both national and international recognition for its success for creating a dynamic learning environment that promotes academic excellence and fosters leadership.
Founded by its namesake, Ron Clark and co-founder Kim Bearden, the Ron Clark Academy has a wide range of 4th – 8th grade students representing various socio-economic and academic backgrounds and communities from across the metro region. The Ron Clark Academy's vision is to transform classrooms around the world by demonstrating transformative methods and techniques that are brought to life with the use of integrated audio and video.
The Solution
A 52-foot-diameter, circular NanoLumens LED screen installed on the ceiling at the Ron Clark Academy by specialist integrator Baker Audio Visual. The system is a performance and educational aid for the school's students and educators, who come from all over the world to participate in events and training. The backbone of the system consists of a 4x4K media server, a video wall controller, amplifiers/DSP, servers, and more.
Datapath was chosen for this project because of our ability to support custom resolutions/timings on our capture card inputs and our graphics card outputs. At the time that this opportunity was quoted, Datapath was first-to-market with a commercial 4K/60 UHD graphics card solution – Image4K - which was essential for meeting this project's requirements.
The Datapath VSN controller is acting as a gatekeeper, signal router, and video processor that merges custom high-resolution media content and more conventional video sources to the unique ceiling mounted NanoLumens dvLED video display system.
The Result
The huge, circular NanoLumens LED screen installed on the ceiling at the Ron Clark Academy is a wonder to behold - not only when being used for educational purposes but when it's not being used as an educational tool, the screen displays scenes of dragons flying overhead, landing and looking down into the room. The spectacular install won SCN's Best Installation award in 2020.
Greg Dieckhaus, Datapath's sales manager for the region, said: "This is a project that encapsulates all that is great about AV – delivering superb engagement for education while inspiring the next generation. The virtual ceiling looks incredible, and we are delighted to help make it possible with our market-leading video processors and graphics cards."
"Datapath VSN controllers are often considered for control rooms only. But this deployment demonstrates that Datapath VSN controllers can support creative applications as well."
