Bad Bunny's Record-Breaking UK Tour Runs on Four Disguise Servers

Carlos Charly Camina, the tour's media server engineer, oversaw the setup. TechRadar reported that the entire production runs on four GX 3+ servers, with the fifth unit acting as an understudy for the show's director. That is down from five servers during the tour's earlier Puerto Rico leg, despite the world tour carrying significantly more content layers and considerably bigger screens at 10,752 x 2,816 pixels, which require a 4K input. The GX3+ upgrade roughly doubled processing headroom for the same effects load, making it possible to deliver more with a smaller footprint.

The lighting system uses grandMA kit, which TechRadar described as the live-event industry standard, with a grandMA light desk as the main control surface and a grandMA3 compact unit as backup. The whole setup sits on a dedicated network split into eight isolated VLANs. The structure is designed to contain faults so that a problem in one part of the system cannot spread and collapse the entire show. On a production of this scale, the engineering challenge is not adding more hardware but finding the smallest reliable solution that works every night, in any venue, anywhere in the world.

Adaptability became central during rehearsals. The creative team at Sturdy suggested photographing the crowd during the opening act and displaying those images on LED screens around the venue later in the show. Camina's instinct was to push back, because loading fresh, unvetted content into the live system with no headroom for troubleshooting is a risk engineers avoid. His solution kept the photography content out of the Disguise system altogether. He built a standalone application using HTTP Sockpuppet and OSC to communicate with the main Disguise system, running off a laptop. A photographer hands over images for Camina to upload. When the relevant cue fires inside Disguise, it sends a request to the laptop for specific images, which are mapped to specific locations on a four-way live layout.

Camina said the hardest part was not the concept but the live timing: ensuring front-of-house and on-stage servers sync closely enough to avoid discernible lag, and making sure the system never repeats the same face twice in one night. TechRadar reported that the approach reflects a pattern across the build: rather than adding risk to a proven core system, Camina builds smaller satellite systems to support it and keeps them loosely connected.

The tour's most curious element involved Concho, a Puerto Rican-inspired 3D animated frog rendered live using Unreal Engine and a face-tracked performer. The character interacted directly with Bad Bunny mid-show as part of a FaceTime call. The segment needed a camera that could move freely, handheld, so the team decided to use an iPhone. The phone could not have any visible external antennas. That meant the feed from the iPhone had to be captured over NDI on a dedicated Wi-Fi network, rather than a standard wireless link that could have been interrupted by the tens of thousands of audience and staff devices around the arena. Camina's team scans the RF spectrum every night to find clear channels before the Concho segment goes live.