Inside African Energy Week: How LittleBig delivered a massive eight-venue broadcast workflow in real time

African Energy Week (AEW), the flagship event of the African Energy Chamber has become one of Africa’s most significant industry gatherings. Since its launch in 2021, with a bold mission to eradicate energy poverty by 2030, the four-day conference has drawn African energy leaders, global investors and senior policymakers. This year, more than 3000 delegates descended on Cape Town.

Yet the scale of the challenge remains massive: as of 2025, around 600 million people across the continent of Africa still lack access to electricity – this makes up nearly half the continent’s population and over 80% of the global electricity access gap.

Pulling off a production of this magnitude, both in terms of the practical and its political significance, where there are multiple venues running simultaneously, is no small feat. With bases in Cape Town, Amsterdam, Cyprus and Dubai, production company LittleBig took charge of everything: stage, design, capture, streaming, on-site editing and production management.

“We delivered edits of all tracks and sessions at the end of each day, daily highlight reels and 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.”

To make that happen, eight venues ran in parallel, supported by 21 live camera feeds for eight hours a day. The main keynote hall seated 1,200 delegates and was streamed to overflow rooms before the programme split into seven additional spaces, each with its own live schedule and production requirements.

Blackmagic URSA Broadcast G2 and Blackmagic Studio Cameras handled the capture, while ATEM Television Studio HD8 ISO switchers powered vision mixing for both IMAG projection and streaming. Footage was either recorded straight to a Blackmagic Cloud Store Mini 16TB over 10Gb Ethernet or handed to a DIT via SSDs.

Once a session wrapped, LittleBig’s post-production engine roared to life. Seven editors immediately jumped into DaVinci Resolve Studio to deliver polished deliverables. Completed edits were checked, rendered and sent to the client via a Cloud Store Mini 8TB synced to Dropbox.

“Having 10Gb connectivity and a solid-state RAID allowed for multiuser access,” noted 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 broaden coverage even further, roaming wireless rigs included URSA Broadcast G2 cameras paired with DJI SDR Transmission and MiddleThings APC control, as well as Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6Ks flying on Ronin RS4 Pro gimbals.

This setup ensured full camera control, tally and comms even in challenging environments. Some rooms required capturing speakers from nearly 50 metres away, yet B4 lenses on the URSA Broadcast G2s delivered clean and consistent shots that matched seamlessly with the rest of the camera line-up.

On the AV front, the keynote hall featured two massive LED walls with matching repeater screens, while breakout rooms used smaller LED setups. Barco E2 processors handled scaling and playback, fed by an ATEM Television Studio 4K8, which also supplied Dataton media servers for layered content. Magnimage EC90 processors drove the breakout displays.

The stakes were high, and the team left nothing to chance. “Reliability was non-negotiable,” 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.”

Sweet said locking in URSA Broadcast G2 as the main camera, with Blackmagic Studio Cameras filling out the positions, simplified everything from lensing to control. “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 colour grade on each session, so camera control was a major gain for us in post.”

As delegates wrapped up each day, finished edits that included full sessions, highlight reels, and social-ready content, were already delivered. What once required weeks was now completed within hours, demonstrating how broadcast and AV workflows, tightly integrated can redefine large-scale event and conference production.

When asked how LittleBig justified the investment, Sweet pointed to tangible wins. “Standardising on a Blackmagic end to end has shortened setup and made results more consistent across jobs,” he 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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