Storm Broadcast and EVS held an event showcasing broadcast production techniques in a mock Esports event at Southampton’s Solent University, England. The event was held for prospective students at the Solent, giving them exposure to broadcast and helping them decide if it for them. A small 2v2 CS GO game was played live for content!
Brainstorm’s InfinitySet provided the virtual set for presenters, in a set that had been modified with an Esports theme. The set provided the option to run a camera shot that focused on virtual screens which displayed each team’s score, including animations highlighting a round win. This was done using a Brainstorm Aston project displayed as a texture in Unreal, providing easy live data manipulation and excellent integration. Furthermore, Aston actually provided the game HUD for the viewers, taking game data from CS GO and changing all the various stats live. Although not strictly necessary as CS GO provides its own HUD, it proved the ability of Aston to take Python commands in a fluid, live environment and give the user the options of creating something custom.
EVS’s excellent Dyvi tied the story together. The Dyvi is particularly well suited to Esports, due to its extreme flexibility and huge range of inputs. Esports production companies FACEIT and ESL operate a Dyvi, giving these lucky students the chance to get close to this high-end piece of equipment used in real world Esports broadcasts. For our event, the Dyvi was set up to automatically switch the gamer camera feed, dependent on which was player was being viewed at the time – a simple but powerful tool.
Storm Broadcast and EVS set this day up in collaboration with the staff from the ‘Live Event Tech’ course at Solent. Course leader Polly Hickling had this to say:
“This was such a fantastic event, for us, having the kit from Brainstorm and EVS allowed us to show those considering their careers how fields they were interested in (gaming and live broadcast) were merging and therefore providing potential future career options for them with realworld applications.”
Special thanks to Lee Davison for helping with the setup and integration. It was a very enjoyable day, with some great results – most notably ‘Storm Gaming’ clinching the title 16-10!