The two-story studio has 5,000+ sq. ft. in the LED space
Sunday marks the start of the 29th season of the NFL on Foxand, to mark the occasion, the network’s popular pregame show, Sunday on Fox NFL got a new house.
Fox Sports is set to unveil a new Studio A at its facility on the Fox Studios Lot in Los Angeles. The large, two-story space features a large anchor desk, offers multiple shooting locations, and leans heavily toward LED and augmented-reality graphics and imagery with 5,130 sq. ft. of LED wall and floor panels.
“The practical set is amazing,” said Zac Fields, SVP, graphic technology and integration, Fox Sports. “It is very impressive, but I am a little more excited about what we can do with the LED volume. This is the next evolution of technology that I think everyone in the industry is working towards. It’s very exciting.”
The studio, designed in collaboration with Jack Morton Design, features an LED volume that incorporates extended-reality (XR) technology. Fox invested in solutions from Vizrt (11 engines) to provide all LED monitoring, Unreal Engine (25 engines) to provide all AR and LED volume, and Stype’s Stypeland for to track the camera in Unreal Engine. The set also uses Stype solutions for multi-display with full LED volume.
Fox Sports will debut a new studio facility in Los Angeles this Sunday with the return of Fox NFL Sunday. (Image: Fox Sports)
The studio has new cameras from Grass Valley, new lenses from Canon, and a 24-ft. Technocrane. Four cameras in the set can be live-tracked simultaneously within the LED volume.
“I think it’s probably the most technically challenging set we’ve ever done,” said Fields, who has been with Fox Sports since 2000. “In terms of the amount of LED, the way it’s used in a live environment and the number of graphics-rendering engines and power out there, it’s no small task. It took the whole team here to get it where it is.”
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Fox Sports has invested significant effort in integrating the Unreal Engine into its studio operations. The broadcaster’s NASCAR station in Charlotte, NC, which opened in 2019, is an important step in Fox’s work on virtual studios. That studio, however, used a green screen rather than an LED. Fields says that, when the construction of Sunday on Fox NFL set, his team favored LED over green screen for the benefit of the talent on set: Curt Menefee, Terry Bradshaw, Howie Long, Jimmy Johnsonand Michael Strahan.
“I would say that’s a big factor in our use of LED on the green screen,” Fields said. “We’ve been doing green screen for a long time, and the talent is used to it, but, when they interact with anything on the wall, they don’t see it. With LED, they do. It’s a little more natural for them, and it’s an easy transition.”
The studio has been a long sprint for the Fox Sports team with more than six months and more than 30,000 combined staff hours to get it ready for Sunday’s debut.
“We needed every moment of that time and could have used more understanding of how it was going to work,” Fields said. “How do you get the cameras in this environment? How do you light subjects and create real-time shadows on a floor? How do you create scenes efficiently so you can do more different, because you know you’re going to grow up. I can’t put a value on it at least given the amount of time we spent because it’s new and it works very differently. You can’t shoehorn things that you can could have been.”
