Lourdes 2026, lessons learned: 18 computers and 12 entities brought together on the video walls

End of operation at Lourdes. Throughout those 48 hours, about a hundred people, in the rooms, followed the video walls. We were two, in relays at the controls, 24 hours a day. The prefecture of Hautes-Pyrénées (the State’s local authority in the département) sums it up in one sentence: Pope Leo XIV’s visit “took place in good conditions and without any major incident”.

Here are our lessons learned, with figures. The full case study, with the story, the photos and the videos of the build, is online.

An exceptional event

The official figures, published by the press the day after the visit, give the scale:

• about 200,000 people over the weekend of 26 and 27 September;
• 3,000 police officers and gendarmes, with soldiers from Operation Sentinelle and the Air Force, and an anti-drone system;
• 700 first responders: 370 firefighters, 280 first-aiders from the Red Cross and the Order of Malta, 50 healthcare staff from the SAMU (French emergency medical service);
• 475 people treated by the rescue services, including 9 absolute emergencies.

Behind this operation, a room was needed where all these services see each other, talk to each other and decide together.

What we deployed

The prefecture brought together a wide range of services. The initial request was for 8 captures, that is, 8 computers to display on the walls. By the end of the operation, we were displaying 18, for a dozen entities, in the same picture.

• Two main walls of 9 screens each, more than 20 m² of display between the two.
• Three satellite rooms driven at a fingertip, each bringing together up to 8 sources with our Multiprise HDMI.
• Five to seven 65-inch screens mirroring the walls, elsewhere in the room.

The photos show only part of the room. It was very large, and many other services worked behind the panels.

One computer for two walls

The two walls and the control screen were driven by one single computer, each wall displayed in ultra-high definition (4K). This computer had no Internet access. For the event, we had prepared dedicated scenarios, with a dozen zones named by entity. One source could feed several zones, full frame or split into four.

On reliability, nothing was left to chance:

• Sixteen days of preparation, thirteen of them testing on the test workstation.
• Ten defects revealed by the tests, all fixed before opening. Several only appear after hours of operation: a ten-minute demonstration would not have shown them.
• 24 hours of continuous endurance testing, two walls, scenario changes in series, before freezing the version.
• The operator stays in control. The software never restarts a source by itself: in a crisis room, it is the human who decides.

Result: from late Saturday afternoon until Monday, a reading every thirty minutes, no crash.

Maximum resilience: it is our motto

For every link that could fail, we had a backup on site, plugged in and tried out:

• A backup server, next to the control computer, ready to take over.
• Television by antenna. A UHF antenna, a two-input tuner card and a TNT dongle (digital terrestrial TV), to pick up the channels by antenna if the online feed dropped.
• QuickShare in the room. QuickShare ran on our server, behind our router, with no need for the Internet. The last-minute guest joins the room’s network, over Wi-Fi or with our cable, opens a link, clicks: their screen is on the wall. Nothing to install, no account, no sound transmitted.
• The version hosted in France, as a spare wheel. If the room’s network went down, we would switch to it, on the team’s decision. For the guest, the same gesture and the same screen.

The site’s network worked very well all weekend. None of these backups had to be used. All of them could have been. At the very worst, we still had a solution: that is what resilience means.

The convoy, camera after camera

One moment sums up the usefulness of a common picture. On Monday, around 8 o’clock, our eyes were glued to the walls to follow the convoy to the airport. The pictures relayed each other: sanctuary cameras, then municipal police, then Police nationale, then Gendarmerie.

A Gendarmerie colonel, like a conductor, guided us to bring the services’ pictures together in the same view. The decision-makers, gathered together, a finger pointing at a detail, discussed, then decided.

What we take from it

HDMI brings together what networks keep apart. Twelve entities means twelve information systems that do not connect to each other, and that is just as it should be. CollectivView takes the picture from each workstation through a simple cable: we bring the pictures together on screen, never the networks.

The need grows, the system must keep up. From 8 captures requested to 18 in service: every service that sees the wall wants to bring its own picture. Adding a source means one more HDMI cable, not a project.

We test for a long time, then we freeze. It is the days of testing that bring out the real defects.

The hardest part is the cable that gets unplugged. In a temporary room, workstations move: a cable not pushed in fully, a window to reposition, a screen to extend rather than duplicate so as to show only what should be shown. It takes patience, and a team on site.

Nothing was recorded. CollectivView collected no photo and no video during the event. And in the room in service, photos were forbidden: those we publish date from the build, the tests or the end of the operation.

A temporary room goes up fast. Two days of assembly with three people, dismantling started on the very day of departure: the story of the build is in our article on the assembly.

A crisis room does not sleep. More than 48 hours of continuous service, two of us, in relays. An event of this scale runs 24 hours a day, and it must be planned for.

From the smiles of our clients and of the participants, we want to believe that the service went beyond expectations. The strength of the collective.

Acknowledgements

The teams of the prefecture of Hautes-Pyrénées showed remarkable professionalism. A big thank you to Chrystel Abbadie and Maxime Dutrieux, of the prefecture’s SIDSIC, and to Patrice Cano, head of the information and communication systems department of the SDIS 65. Thank you to Kimex for the quality of its mounts.

An event to secure, a control room to set up for a few days? Let’s talk · See the typical command room

Sources of the official figures: France 3 Occitanie, bilan des secours and France 3 Occitanie, le dispositif.