Case Study: Totally Virtual Production for Cycling
How to cut out OB Scanners, Production Pods, Flyaway kit and expensive hardware in a production for International Broadcasters
Most remote productions being used in lockdown have had staff remotely operating kit from home connected through to a CAR in a studio or OB truck housing all the broadcast kit.
Happy were asked to cover the Skoda V-Women's Tour - a replacement for the Pro's annual cycling tour of cities in Britain cancelled for Covid19. The virtual tour would be for 55 Pro cyclists all using Smart Trainers at home entering a virtual race on the RGT game platform racing round 3 courses including Canary Wharf in a night race.
The shows were produced by Century TV using some more brain power and facilities from Innovate Live and Happy Graphics. A totally virtual production suite was developed for Games machines, Vision Mixer, Routing, Sound, Comms, Graphics interface and Replays. No Scanner Required - No production pods, no flyaway kit, no expensive kit in people's homes.
Team were spread over the country - Producer / Vision Mixer / Graphics / Engineer / Games Camera Op in one location with Sound, Comms and Streaming in other locations.
Approx 55 Riders, 16 Team Managers and 2 Commentators were contributors to the show using sound and vision feeds. The show was streamed to 8 destinations including the BBC iplayer and website all taking the shows live.
The Clever Stuff…..
Create a Virtual Production Suite taking the best of Vision Mixing software, the best talkback solution, bespoke software to handle the 60+ camera and sound feeds from contributors. 19 virtual machines were used across the production for processing, gaming, streaming and backup.
Run 3 spectator feeds of the game on virtual machines and use a broadcast camera person to operate the game spectator feeds to make the shots more attractive in-race and allow the Producer and VM to ask for shots of specific riders or go to action points in the race.
Create a sub-mix solution allowing the sub-mix operator to switch PiP feeds going into various camera and game layouts to select riders and managers feeds and auto update graphics so whatever 3 box, 4 box, 6 box layout - the video feed always had the correct graphic name for viewers at home
Run the whole production from laptops, big monitors and 'standard' equipment at the remote locations and doing without £££££ scanners, vision desks, etc
Ability to remotely refresh camera settings from riders and eliminate portrait phone camera shots
Many many other bespoke software solutions to make the production easier