NHK: End of Year Show
Visual Experience Team
Realtime Background Visual Development & Augmented Reality Software Development
December 2018
The Challenge:
To use our newly created “sync system” technology in a 4 hour live production.
How:
We developed a highly specialised mix of the latest technology, as well as the best-in-class video distribution systems to create a system capable of long, stable real-time playback, and our in-house engineers created numerous photo-realistic stage sets and worked with light designers to integrate not only spot, wash and par lights, but also laser lighting and LED based lighting into the virtual sets.
Technology:
- Sync System Tech
- Video Distribution Tech
- Unity
- Maya
/stu powered the TV show for over 4 hours and the show was watched by over 30 million people nationwide. We also tracked the camera movement to line up the virtual camera with the real camera to create compelling real-time augmented reality for a TV broadcast.
In this show we realistically simulated the beam lighting, and the LED lighting attached to the virtual props, and all of this was controlled by the lighting tech.
The benefit of using this software for TV is several fold:
- No tricky prop or stage moving needed between songs.
- Visuals that are otherwise impossible to pull off with physical sets (particles, otherworldly style effects)
- Able to create a sense of space, even in a small studio
- As everything is run in real-time with Unity, we are able to simulate before the show exactly how everything will look
- Of course, during rehearsals we record backups of the performances and have them ready to go in case anything unthinkable happens.
- The triggering of events, lighting and performances are all done using SMPTE timecode, the same timing signal used in standard broadcasts.
You will notice that virtual sets that can be rendered in realtime are becoming extremely popular nowadays. Just last year the BBC introduced their own virtual set powered by Unreal. We found Unity to be the preferred engine as the amount of plugins and customisation in not just tools and inputs but also graphical styles is unparalleled.
