For three days we produced the full livestream of Dekmantel's RADAR stage. Ten cameras fed a neural network and TouchDesigner system that found and blurred faces in the crowd in real time, so the audience stayed anonymous while the artists stayed in focus.
- Client
- Dekmantel
- Scope
- Design · Build · Operate
- Cameras
- 10 incl. crane + 2 GoPro
- Processing
- Real-time face tracking
- Output
- YouTube livestream
- Recordings
- 29 sets
- Hardware
- smls.
Watch the sets
Open on YouTube →
Plays from YouTube. Pressing play loads YouTube content.
The system
RADAR is Dekmantel’s most intimate stage: the crowd surrounds the DJ on all sides and from above, and the stream puts viewers right in the middle of it. That closeness raises a question every festival stream has to answer: how do you show the energy of a crowd without broadcasting the faces of thousands of people, so the music always stays in focus?
Our answer was to make privacy part of the live signal itself. We trained a neural network to detect and blur each face in the crowd as it moved, frame by frame, before the image reached the stream.
Ten cameras covered the stage, including a crane and two roaming GoPro crowd cams, with guest stream directors cutting the show live. Every set was recorded, edited and published on YouTube.
