IMAG (image magnification)

IMAG stands for image magnification. A camera covers the stage, the feed goes through a switcher, and the screens carry the speaker at a size the whole room can read. It is what separates a conference from a slide show.

The threshold is roughly a room where the back row is more than about fifteen metres out, or any room where the audience needs to read expression — an award presentation, a keynote, a panel where who is speaking matters as much as what is said.

It is not the same job as putting slides on a screen, and this is where budgets get caught out. Slides are a laptop and a cable. IMAG is at least one camera, an operator, a switcher and someone cutting it, because a camera left unattended on a wide shot is worse than no camera at all. Where slides and IMAG share a screen, someone has to decide live which one the room sees at any moment, which is a person, not a setting.

Done properly it is invisible. The audience simply feels close to the stage, which is the entire point.

Corporate event production — owned inventory, our own crew, and a site survey before anything is specified.

• Video switcher The device that decides which source the screens are showing at any given second, and the person operating it is as much of the specification as the box.
• Confidence monitor A screen facing the stage rather than the audience, showing the presenter their own slides so they never have to turn around.
• LED wall A screen built from modular LED panels bolted together, bright enough to read in daylight and sized to the room rather than to a projector lens.