Virtual Sets Gain Traction in Station Studios

Two major station groups will deploy virtual set elements as part of election night coverage in November from at least one of their stations, according to two major set design firms.

FX Design Group in Ocoee, Fla., and Devlin Design Group in Crested Butte, Colo., say they each are at work on hybrid designs combining hard and virtual set elements that will give the station groups a taste of what can be accomplished with virtual news sets. Neither design firm was able to reveal the identity of the group each is working with, but formal announcements are expected before election night, they say.

What makes the rollouts of virtual set technology — if even on a limited basis — potentially so significant is that the deployments may be harbingers of an attitudinal shift among local U.S. broadcasters when it comes to virtual set technology.

“If you brought up the words ‘virtual’ or ‘digital’ to a news director several years ago, they got out the garlic and ran you off because they said, ‘It’s too cartoony. It doesn’t work. It’s was not real [looking],” says Mac McLaughlin, CEO and creative director at FX Design Group. “For a long time it was almost like a third rail, but those perceptions are changing.

“I think when you see the first couple of groups get their toes wet, and it [a virtual set] looks good, virtual will begin to move faster towards acceptance,” he says.

A hybrid approach combines a traditional hard set with an oversized green screen area that allows stations to integrate virtual elements into their news presentations and gain experience working with virtual technology without risking the entire newscast on a technology long viewed by stations with skepticism, McLaughlin says.

“We recommend going that route,” says Dan Devlin, owner and chief creative strategist of Devlin Design Group. “It allows people to start dabbling in virtual, learning what it can do. Because, remember, this is a completely different environment that no one but the weather talent is used to working in.”

The top reason for the growing acceptance of virtual sets by broadcasters is believability, says McLaughlin. In 2012, FX Design Group commissioned Frank N. Magid Associates to study viewer attitudes toward virtual sets when compared to hard sets. “Among the study’s key findings was a correlation between the set being real enough and allowing the anchors and reporters to be believable and trustworthy,” McLaughlin says.

Based on the findings, McLaughlin partnered FX Design Group with Hybrid, a virtual studio and augmented reality system company in Montrouge, France. At the 2014 NAB Show, Hybrid presented virtual sets created with the real-world designs of FX Design Group deployed at WCCO, the CBS-owned station in Minneapolis, and WFLA, the Media General NBC affiliate in Tampa, Fla.

“At the show, people were able to say, ‘I know what that set looks like on TV, and when I look at it as a virtual demo it doesn’t look that much different. I can believe it,” recalls McLaughlin. Since the NAB Show, FX Design Group has begun offering virtual sets rendered on Hybrid virtual reality engines to all of its customers, he adds.

There are a couple of other reasons broadcasters are beginning to be more drawn to virtual sets, McLaughlin says. 

As local broadcasters produce an increasing number of hours of local content, virtual sets offer an affordable alternative to building multiple hard sets. They also eliminate the work involved in setting up and tearing down the studio for different shows. And there is the desire on the part of many stations to be green, both in terms of reducing, or even ultimately eliminating, the lumber needed for a set, and also transporting the set from where it’s built to the station, McLaughlin says.

From a usage point of view, an extra-large chromakey portion of a hybrid set positioned to one side of the hard set offers news directors more flexibility in how they present stories. “Depending upon the camera angles, we can get completely immersed in the virtual side of things, or we can cross shoot from the main area over into the chromakey, which makes the foreground real and the background virtual,” says Devlin.

He adds that virtual set rendering engines have finite system memory devoted to polygons and texture maps. So using real-world objects, such as an anchor desk, in the foreground of a hybrid set as opposed to a complicated 3D model of a desk leaves greater system resources for creating and rendering virtual elements in the background.

One place where Devlin and McLaughlin differ on virtual sets is their thoughts about cost. “For most, a virtual set is a little out of reach,” says Devlin. “For what one of those [virtual rendering and camera tracking] systems cost, we can design and build a heck of a large, dynamic storytelling hard set.”

McLaughlin agrees that the cost for a high-end system with tracking and one of his hard sets is comparable. “But in six months, nine months or two years when you need a new set, [with a virtual set] you are only paying for design.”

Another area of disagreement is the degree to which broadcasters will embrace virtual technology.

“We are optimistic that we will see growth in the area of virtual, but at this point 90% to 95% of our business has been — and will continue to be — hard set work,” Devlin says.

FX Design Group is recommending stations consider deploying a lower-cost virtual set system as part of a hybrid approach whenever they think about a new set. Not only will this approach allow stations to take advantage of virtual elements in their newscast, but it also will save stations money as they use the virtual component for other local productions, such as Friday night sports recaps or Saturday morning chat shows, McLaughlin says.

“This approach is a good bridge into a virtual future,” he says. “I think in five to 10 years stations will say, ‘This isn’t so bad, I could do my whole newscast virtually.’ ”

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