DIT Chuck Pappas on delivering a cine-live workflow for Karol G’s Coachella headline set

At this year’s Coachella, three major artists took over the festival’s main stage as headliners: Sabrina Carpenter, Justin Bieber, and Karol G. Each brought a completely different creative approach to the desert — from Bieber’s stripped-back, nostalgic set built around his early YouTube videos to the kind of large-scale spectacle the festival has become known for.

Karol G’s history-making performance as Coachella’s first Latina headliner fully embraced that scale. Towering LED walls, pyro effects, vibrant visuals, an extensive light show, and even a giant parrot (yes, you read that correctly) transformed the stage into an explosion of color and energy. 

As part of the wider technical team, DIT Chuck Pappas managed a 36-camera setup using Livegrade 7 to create a consistent cinematic look across the festival’s massive IMAG screens. The goal was not just to broadcast the performance but to make the audience feel fully immersed. In this interview, Chuck breaks down the technical workflow behind the show, shares insights into the growing world of cine-live production, and explains the challenges of delivering a production at Coachella scale.

A cinematic look for Karol G 

When it comes to live music, Coachella has become one of the biggest festivals in the world. But today, it’s about much more than the music itself. Audiences increasingly expect live shows to reflect an artist’s wider visual identity. 

Artists want their live performances to look as cinematic and meticulously crafted as their music videos.

DIT Chuck Pappas is experiencing this shift firsthand: „Through my company, Witty Phoenix, I’m seeing a massive, industry-wide shift in what clients and audiences expect from live events. The days of accepting a flat, clinical, standard broadcast look for massive concerts are ending. Artists want their live performances to look as cinematic and meticulously crafted as their music videos.“  

Delivering that aesthetic in a live environment requires a great deal of technical skill and ambition. But according to Chuck, the challenge is also what makes the work so rewarding. 

„It requires a tremendous amount of high-end hardware, incredibly robust software like Livegrade 7, and crews who are willing to push the boundaries of what is technically possible in real-time. It’s an incredibly demanding space to work in, but getting to be at the forefront of the “cine-live” movement is a brilliant place to be.“

It’s an incredibly demanding space to work in, but getting to be at the forefront of the “cine-live” movement is a brilliant place to be.

So how did he end up there? Chuck tells us that his experience across both traditional film production and large-scale live events naturally led him toward this kind of hybrid workflow:

„Having spent two decades building my foundation in LA, my roots are deeply tied to traditional cinema, documentaries, and high-end commercial work. Las Vegas, on the other hand, is an incredibly dynamic hub for high-end live events, massive concert residencies, and large-scale activations. This dual-city presence perfectly mirrors my career. I frequently bounce between the meticulous environment of traditional single-camera film sets and the fast-paced, high-pressure world of massive live music festivals and global broadcast events.“ 

From the second Chuck joined the Karol G project, it became clear that it would demand every last bit of his expertise.

„Director of Photography Keyan Safyari brought me on board with a single goal to make Karol G’s finale of Coachella the most cinematic live concert anyone has ever experienced“, he shares. 

With this ambitious goal in mind, let’s take a closer look at how Chuck and the wider team made it happen. 

Crew constellation and responsibilities

„For a show of this magnitude, the department has to be highly modular but tightly integrated,“ Chuck explains. He worked in a dual role that connected several parts of the production: 

„As the DIT and Technical Director, I sat at the nexus of several specialized teams, bridging the gap between the camera department, lighting, and the broadcast truck.“

Each department had a clearly defined role within the overall pipeline:

„The heavy lifting of the overall cable infrastructure, fiber runs, and dedicated camera control was expertly handled by the team at Wide + Close, where I worked closely with their dedicated DIT, Jordan Harriman. Meanwhile, the massive IMAG screens were driven by the company Vis A Vis. My guest DIT booth was actually integrated directly into their footprint, allowing me to coordinate seamlessly with our IMAG DIT, Casey Bornhell, and their two incredible booth engineers—specifically Joe Huntley, who was an absolute lifesaver during the run of the show. On the lighting side, ensuring our color science reacted perfectly to the live stage dynamics meant working hand-in-hand with our Associate Lighting Designer, Sam Paine.“

Keeping all of those moving parts aligned required constant communication throughout the show:

„Being in constant dialogue over dedicated, isolated comms channels allowed us to function as a single organism and ensure the cinematic aesthetic matched the shifting stage lighting perfectly across all 36 angles.“ 

Given the nature of live events, thorough preparation was required to test both the technical setup and team collaboration aspects of the production. 

„In a cine-live environment, prep is about engineering an absolute safety net. Because there are no second takes, our rehearsal process is incredibly rigorous and leaves no room for assumptions. You have to anticipate the unpredictability of a live concert.“ 

Preparing for the unpredictable 

During prep and rehearsals, Chuck and DP, Keyan Safyari established nine foundational looks—the primary show LUTs and baseline CDLs used to harmonize the different camera families across various portions of the show. But unlike a traditional film production, those looks also had to remain flexible enough to adapt to constantly changing stage conditions:

„You have to design LUTs that are robust and flexible enough to handle deep, saturated concert lighting, aggressive strobes, and pyro across entirely different sensor types. On a film set, you have the luxury of time to precisely flag a light or tweak a node tree for a single, perfect angle. You are building a look in a controlled vacuum. In a cine-live environment like the Coachella Main Stage, you are building a look in a hurricane“, Chuck explains. 

In a cine-live environment like the Coachella Main Stage, you are building a look in a hurricane.

As it turned out, that hurricane metaphor became very literal, forcing the team into the live show with far less rehearsal time than planned:

„The high winds at Coachella are notorious, and they put the production schedule massively behind. Because of the delays, our on-stage rehearsal was cut short, meaning I lost my dedicated four hours of lighting and color rehearsal. As a result, the baseline looks we built during prep were never able to be integrated into the main stage environment before we went live. When I say I live-graded 36 cameras, I mean I legitimately graded 36 cameras in real-time from scratch. It was a high-wire act, but I relied heavily on my scopes and the foundational knowledge I had of the performance to execute the job.“

Harmonizing that complex of an ecosystem under the pressure of a live festival environment couldn’t have been executed with anything but Livegrade 7.

The challenge became even greater because the production relied on cameras from multiple manufacturers.

„What made this uniquely challenging was the hardware diversity; the camera bodies came from four different manufacturers, including Sony, RED, DJI, and Blackmagic. That meant managing a massive amount of color space and sensor variation in real-time. Harmonizing that complex of an ecosystem under the pressure of a live festival environment couldn’t have been executed with anything but Livegrade 7.“ 

Signal routing and Livegrade 7 workflow 

Chuck’s guest DIT booth was directly integrated into the Vis-a-Vis footprint, the company in charge of the massive IMAG screens with their additional DITs. 

„This physical proximity was crucial. It allowed me to be within arm’s reach of Joe Huntley and Casey Bornhell, ensuring that as I was managing the color pipeline, we were in perfect lockstep with what was hitting the massive IMAG screens.“ 

The signal path itself was carefully structured to keep the workflow efficient while maintaining image integrity from stage to screen.

„Everything was organized around a strictly fully redundant 12G-SDI pipeline, meaning every primary monitor, router, and control surface had an immediate, hot-swappable backup. The camera feeds came via fiber from the stage and first hit the Camera Control Units (CCUs), where Jordan Harriman and the Wide + Close team handled the foundational iris shading and exposure. Immediately after that CCU shading, the clean signals were routed directly into our array of AJA ColorBoxes.“

At the center of the infrastructure was a routing system designed to handle the scale and complexity of a 36-camera live production.

„Our routing core relied heavily on Blackmagic routers, which provided the matrix size and reliability needed for a 36-camera shoot. For the actual real-time color processing, we deployed a fleet of AJA ColorBoxes in OpenGear racks. These are absolute workhorses in a cine-live environment, allowing us to process high-fidelity 4K signals with near-zero latency. We also utilized various Blackmagic Design converters and distribution amplifiers to handle localized handoffs and ensure complete signal integrity across the different technical departments.“

On top of this physical infrastructure sat the central control layer that tied everything together and made real-time decision-making possible.

„The absolute brain of the color operation was Pomfort Livegrade 7. When you are wrangling 36 different cameras and trying to maintain a cohesive cinematic aesthetic under wildly dynamic stage lighting, Livegrade is the only software robust enough to manage that many active CDL and LUT pipelines simultaneously without lagging or crashing.

The absolute brain of the color operation was Pomfort Livegrade 7. 

„I used Livegrade 7 to actively network and control the ColorBoxes in real-time. We applied our show LUTs, adjusted the CDLs, and reacted to Sam Paine’s live lighting cues. Once the signal passed through that Livegrade-controlled ColorBox node, the cinematic look was permanently baked in. From there, that polished, color-graded feed was pushed out simultaneously to the broadcast switcher for the global live stream and handed off to Vis A Vis for the massive festival IMAG screens. Which were finalized through our IMAG DIT Casey Bornhell.“ 

With its complete architectural overhaul and expanded functionality, Livegrade 7 now extends naturally into cinematic live productions involving large numbers of cameras. Alongside its well-established LUT box-based workflows and integration with a wide range of devices, it easily bridges broadcast color standards such as Rec. 709 and HLG with established cine grading workflows based on CDL, LUT, and ACES.

For Chuck, one of the most critical aspects of Livegrade 7 was its ability to simplify simultaneous multi-camera grading under extreme time pressure. Building on Livegrade’s proven multi-camera capabilities, the new multi-view and multi-grade functionality enables even faster and more comfortable simultaneous real-time iteration across multiple cameras. 

„While the sheer robustness and stability of Livegrade’s integration with our AJA ColorBoxes were lifesavers, the absolute game-changer for me was the multi-grade functionality by linking nodes. When you are sitting at the helm of a 36-camera ecosystem featuring Sony, RED, DJI, and Blackmagic sensors, the sheer math of managing those different color spaces simultaneously is staggering. When the stage lighting at Coachella shifts drastically, you don’t have the time to adjust 36 individual nodes. By linking the nodes in Livegrade, I was able to group specific camera families and apply sweeping, relative CDL adjustments instantly. I can say without a doubt that linking is the only way a single operator could possibly grade 36 disparate cameras on the fly at a show of this magnitude.“ 

Another key feature proved invaluable when the team encountered an unexpected technical issue during the second festival weekend.

„The SDI feed for Camera 25 never made it to my monitors, but I still had network control over its LUT box, which meant I had to grade the camera blindly. I used the AJA ColorBox’s internal frame capture and fed that directly into Livegrade 7’s internal scopes to match the camera at the start of the show. We achieved a flawless image because of it; it’s a massive testament to Pomfort that their digital scopes are that precise.“

Incidents like this underline what defines cine-live work: there is no margin for hesitation, and every decision carries immediate, visible consequences

„You are making instantaneous color decisions for 36 cameras in front of millions of global viewers. There is no undo button, and as we experienced with the wind delays, you don’t always get a rehearsal. That lack of a safety net is an incredible weight to carry.“

We ultimately delivered a near-perfect cinematic experience that I am quite proud of.

Despite that pressure, those constraints are also what make successful outcomes especially meaningful. Looking back, Chuck emphasizes both the result and the people behind it:

„We ultimately delivered a near-perfect cinematic experience that I am quite proud of. But honestly, when the dust settles, the most memorable experience isn’t a specific technical triumph—it’s the people. Over my twenty years in this industry, I’ve been lucky enough to build an amazing film family. Coachella was this beautiful collision of getting to work alongside dear friends I have known and collaborated with for years, while also making incredible new ones in the trenches together.“ 

Big thanks to Chuck for sharing all these insights with us!