LittleBig Transforms African Energy Week Content Delivery
From LED walls to live edits, Blackmagic Design underpinned the conference’s production workflow.
African Energy Week (AEW), the African Energy Chamber’s flagship event, has become one of the continent’s most significant gatherings. Established in 2021 with the mission to eradicate energy poverty by 2030, the annual four day conference brings together African energy leaders, global investors and senior policymakers. In 2025, more than 3,000 delegates, including members of parliament and executives from around the world, convened in Cape Town.
Delivering content from an event of this scale, with simultaneous sessions across multiple venues, was a formidable task. Production company LittleBig, with offices in Cape Town, Amsterdam, Cyprus and Dubai, was responsible for the technical production, spanning stage design, capture, streaming, onsite editing and project management.
“We delivered edits of all tracks and sessions at the end of each day, daily highlight reels, as well as social media edits,” said Roland Sweet, founder and CEO of LittleBig. “The objective was to make the information discussed at the conference available to the broader public.”
The production ran eight venues in parallel with 21 camera feeds live for eight hours a day. Each session was captured using a mix of Blackmagic URSA Broadcast G2 and Blackmagic Studio Cameras, all vision mixing using ATEM Television Studio HD8 ISO live production switcher, with vision mixers splitting duties between IMAG projection and streaming. ISO recordings were ingested either directly to a Blackmagic Cloud Store Mini 16TB network storage device via 10 Gb Ethernet or handed off on SSDs to a DIT.
From there, one of seven editors began work immediately in DaVinci Resolve Studio. Completed edits were quality checked, rendered and delivered to the client through a Blackmagic Cloud Store Mini 8TB synced to Dropbox. “Having 10 Gb connectivity and a solid state RAID allowed for multiuser access,” said Deon Smit, technical operations manager at LittleBig. “The Cloud Store provided a central location for editors and photo teams to work from, which was key to achieving same day turnaround.”
To enhance coverage, wireless roaming cameras included the URSA Broadcast G2 with DJI SDR transmission and MiddleThings APC control, and Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6Ks on the Ronin RS4 Pro gimbal.
Incorporating the URSA Broadcast G2 cameras ensured LittleBig retained full camera control, tally and comms. In addition, some venues during AEW needed shots roughly 50 meters from the sensor to the podium for a head and shoulders frame, and the flexibility of B4 lenses made that straightforward. The cameras naturally matched the other Blackmagic cameras on the same stage.
On the AV side, the keynote hall used two large LED walls with similarly sized repeater screens. Breakout rooms each had smaller LED walls. Barco E2 processors handled scaling and custom playback, taking live feeds from the ATEM Television Studio 4K8. The ATEM also fed Dataton media servers for layered content, and Magnimage EC90 processors drove the breakout displays.
“Reliability was nonnegotiable,” Smit said. “Every camera recorded internally with separate audio backups, FOH equipment ran on UPS, and dual fiber fed the LED walls with redundant processors.”
Facing same day turnarounds on content, Sweet said the decision to standardize on the URSA Broadcast G2 and augment with Blackmagic Studio Cameras came down to simplicity and integration. “We needed to deliver in excess of 35 sessions, ranging from 45 minutes to an hour, before 9 p.m. the same day. Having a camera that gave us flexibility in the lensing, full camera control and direct integration with the rest of the Blackmagic workflow just made sense. We didn’t have time to do a complete color grade on each session, so camera control was a major gain for us in post.”
By the time delegates left the venue each evening, finished edits of every session, plus highlight reels and social content, were already in the client’s hands. What once took weeks took only hours, showing how broadcast and AV workflows converged through Blackmagic Design can transform large scale event production.
Asked how they would justify the spend to finance, the team came back to time and quality. “Standardizing on a Blackmagic end to end setup has shortened setup and made results more consistent across jobs,” Sweet said. “It has also helped keep projects within clients’ budgets, which has strengthened long term relationships, and we have been able to exceed our own ROI expectations.”
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