Built for the opening night, and for the ten thousandth show.

Brainsalt makes media servers, and the software that runs on them, for installations that stay in one building and open every day — domes, flying theatres, panoramas, tunnels, media facades, visitor attractions. The hard part of that work is not getting a picture on screen once. It is getting the same picture, correctly, every day for years, in a venue that has a show to run.

Where it started

The company was founded in 2005 as a project-based service agency, working on media-based and interactive installations one at a time. The same problems kept reappearing in different buildings, so we stopped solving them once each and started building products instead. We grew with the clients we had, and the products grew out of what their projects asked for.

That range now covers the path from a file to a screen. Servers that play uncompressed video at high frame rates and high bit rates, to as many outputs as a venue needs. Camera-based calibration that measures a multi-projector image and holds it aligned against everything that moves with temperature — the building, the screen, the mounts, and the projectors themselves, whose optics and mechanics warm up and cool down with every show. Software for programming and running the effects, lighting and motion that go with the picture — on the same timeline as the video, or from a show controller of its own.

What we take responsibility for

Specifying a server for a show is a calculation whose consequences arrive late. Get the bandwidth wrong and the picture stutters in front of an audience months after anyone remembers who did the arithmetic. Our configurator works it out from the streams a show actually plays, and we guarantee the bandwidth we specify. That risk is ours — not the integrator’s, and not the venue’s.

Where we cannot take work off someone, we try to make it shorter. A server is set up and managed remotely through Brainsalt Hub, so commissioning it does not call for operating-system expertise. The integrator still does the commissioning: that part is their craft, and the project depends on it.

Who answers when it goes wrong

Entertainment is one of the hardest industries in the world to build equipment for. A show runs every day, often many times a day, for years, in front of an audience who paid to be there and a venue that cannot put a sign on the door explaining the fault. Nothing here comes offline for a fortnight to be looked at, and there is no quiet season in which to get away with it.

So support is not a separate department at the end of a form. It comes from the people who build the products, with twenty years of these installations behind them — which usually means the question has been met before, and where it has not, the person answering it is in a position to change the software rather than log the report and wait.

Whose work it is

Some of the largest and most demanding media attractions in the world run on our equipment. They were imagined, designed and built by other people — ride makers, media studios, integrators — for the parks, museums and venues that operate them. The credit belongs to them. Our part sits underneath it: the machine that brings the work to the screen and keeps it there, day after day, for as long as the venue is open.

Showcases

What we are building toward

Media-based attractions ask for more every year — more pixels, more screens, more that has to stay in step with everything else. We build for that, and for the part of it nobody photographs: the show that has to come back up tomorrow morning, correct, and go on doing it the morning after.

Servers

Software