IMAG15 September 2026

IMAG on a Festival Main Stage: What the Audience Actually Needs

Screens at a festival are not there to look impressive. They are there because past about twenty metres a face stops being readable, and a crowd at a main stage is a lot deeper than twenty metres.

Latency is the whole game

Indoors you can get away with a small delay. Outdoors you cannot, because the audience can see the stage and the screen in the same eyeline. Any offset between the two is immediately visible and genuinely unpleasant to watch.

That rules out anything that adds processing delay. It is the reason festival IMAG runs on a direct signal chain rather than through anything clever, and it is the first question to ask of any screen supplier.

LED or projection

Outdoors in daylight, LED. Projection cannot compete with the sun and there is no version of this argument that ends differently.

LED costs more, weighs more and needs a ground support structure or a rig point, all of which has to be in the site plan and signed off structurally. It also works at two in the afternoon, which projection does not.

Projection has a place at indoor and after-dark events. On a main stage in July it does not.

Sizing against crowd depth

The rough working rule is that screen height needs to grow with how far back the audience goes. A screen that looks large from the mix position can be useless from the back of a field.

Worth being honest about this at the quoting stage. A screen too small for the crowd is money spent on something that does not do the job.

The things that catch people out

Sun position. A screen facing west is unreadable for an hour before sunset. Site orientation is decided long before you arrive.

Delay towers. If the site is deep enough for delay speakers, it is deep enough for delay screens, and the video needs to be delayed to match the audio at that distance.

Wind loading. LED walls are large flat objects. There is a wind speed at which they come down, and there is a plan for what happens at that speed.

More on IMAG production and what IMAG costs.