39 ESPORTS FOCUS H1Z1
In gaming there’s details… in the grass, the trees, I do see the importance of it
24in screen that’s six inches from their faces. That’s what it’s going to be. If they lean in they’re going to turn green and blue and I think that’s going to add a touch of realism to it.” HITTING THE TARGET (AUDIENCE) The link to Facebook’s servers was managed by encoding supervisor Tom Sullivan. “I supplied the gear and I encoded everything on-site,” he begins. “They gave me an SDI feed with embedded audio. I input that using an AJA Corvid 88 capture card.” Sullivan selected his equipment with an eye to both convenience and reliability. “I’ve used encoding machines like AWS Elemental and things like that, and I’ve found that a combination of software and hardware makes the job smoother. I know a lot of people who won’t use software because they say it’s not safe. I use a program called vMix that allows me to see everything, to hear it, if I have to add a corner bug or a logo or a technical difficulties slate or something, I can. It’s very basic but when I hit the encoding button it goes on my GPU, on hardware.” The H1PL streams were encoded as 12Mbps H.264 packaged as MP4 with AAC audio, though Sullivan is very aware of the changes that may happen upstream. “A lot of people don’t realise this: What I send out, Facebook doesn’t just grab and spit it out. They do another encoding.
It’s being encoded twice. It may look awesome out of you, but you have to be in contact with upstream.” Happily, Sullivan could rely on the full gigabit connectivity of the purpose-built esports arena, and understands the drive for high resolution and frame rate. “In gaming there’s details…in the grass, the trees, I do see the importance of it.” CLOSING THE GAP Given all this technology and technique, the gap between conventional broadcast production and the high end of streaming is clearly closing. “I grew up in broadcast television,” says Marty Meyer, who has worked extensively in both worlds. “The first time we did this was at least a year and a half ago. We did it as a pilot for one of the TV networks; the second time, we did TwitchCon. Now we’ve finished a ten-week run in Vegas. I think this is new territory…We like this space very much, we think it’s a growth space, and we’ve got the hang of it.” Supervising producer Xander Denke is clearly aware of having done something new. “It’s flattering when looking at other productions that are going on, to see them doing some of the similar things that we were doing. It feels like we were making the right choices and going in the right direction. Our production, unique as it was, will have an effect on future prods all across the esports space.”
end in order to ensure people can’t just hide until all the other players are dead. I don’t know this, I don’t play the game – but suddenly they’re pumping green smoke into the hall so the attendees can have that visceral experience.” This, Kertesz admits, caused an instant of concern, until he realised that “it was on all the cameras, so I knew it wasn’t me!” CRUSHING IT WITH COLOUR Using high-end equipment made certain things easier in an environment heavily populated with LED effects lighting. “The hall was lit to around 4600K,” Kertesz says, “and one of the things I loved about the Panasonic cameras was that I looked at the control panel, and I found the knob that said colour temperature, and I wound it round to 4600K – and the whites fell right in without having to tweak the reds and blues.” He describes the desired result as “a dramatic look. The blacks were not seriously crushed but they were crushed. It was high contrast, high saturation. Not much detail because the cameras were sharp on their own, but in general there was no peeking into the shadows. Blacks were black. That’s what the DOP and I decided.” The portrait cameras on the players were a different story. “The issue was that because the players would lean in and back, the colours of their faces would change constantly. You can’t override a
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