Martin Viper XIP Australian Launch events

A launch event for the new Martin Viper XIP drew amazing crowds to Show Technology’s Sydney showroom on August 22. Clients came to Sydney from across Australia and New Zealand to take part in the event, which showcased exciting new products from the Martin lighting stable, but the main attraction was the Viper XIP, a new legend in the making.

After a much-anticipated wait, the successor to the industry standard MAC Viper arrived on these shores in time to be part of MAC TO THE FUTURE, a dynamic show designed and programmed by well- respected lighting designer Paul Collison, ably assisted by Show Technology’s Technical Director, Vince Haddad. “The legend certainly has struck again; the new Viper is best of class in many ways and a worthy successor to the original, which is still working away today in many applications, some 12 years after its release!” says Vince. “The new MAC Viper XIP is a high-output, full-featured outdoor moving head that will set a new benchmark for performance in its class.”

The MAC TO THE FUTURE show also featured the hugely popular MAC One in abundance, the Aura XIP and PXL in huge quantities, and support from the uber rare MAC Ultra in what many people noticed was a nod to the old days of huge lightshows which were preprogrammed to great soundtracks, while also looking forward with new technology on show. “The whole show was run via P3 through a single network switch and one power distro,” said Vince, “in the old days, a show this size would have been a tangle of DMX cables, data distribution and huge power consumption.”

The MAC TO THE FUTURE theme was designed, developed and adopted by the Show Technology team in-house as a way of reflecting the storied and successful history of the Martin brand not only in Australia, but worldwide. “We have been part of the Martin world since the very early days and we appreciate there are many loyal fans out there today who needed to see their favourite brand in a different light” says Emmanuel Ziino, Show Technology’s Managing Director. “It’s exciting to see Martin releasing such game-changing products, and we very much look forward to the future”. Present for the launch were members of the Danish R+D team Peter Skytte, Henrik Kristensen and Wouter Verlinden; as well as Hanslee Lim, Head of Martin APAC in Singapore and his right-hand man Javier Tan, also from Singapore. More than one hundred industry professionals made their way through the company’s Sydney showroom.

“I’d like to thank PC personally for programming such and an amazing show for us,” says Emmanuel, “he is a busy man and gave up his valuable time for us and Martin to make this event a success.”

Show Technology repeated the event in its Melbourne showroom 29 August. “We knew we simply couldn’t satisfy demand in Sydney in one day, so we always planned to split the launch across the two offices” continues Emmanuel, “we got to do it all over again, which was so exciting!”