NFL Kickoff 2022: Fox Sports To Debut New Studio For Fox NFL Sunday
Two-story studio boasts 5,000+ sq. ft. of LED space
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Sunday marks the start of the 29th season of the NFL on Fox, and, to mark the occasion, the network’s popular pregame show, Fox NFL Sunday is getting a new home.
Fox Sports is set to unveil a new Studio A at its facility at the Fox Studios Lot in Los Angeles. The large, two-story space features a big anchor desk, offers multiple shooting locations, and leans heavily into LED and augmented-reality graphics and imagery with 5,130 sq. ft. of LED wall and floor panels.
“The practical set is absolutely stunning,” says Zac Fields, SVP, graphic technology and integration, Fox Sports. “It’s very impressive, but I’m a little bit more excited about what we can do with the LED volume. It’s this next evolution of technology that I think everyone in the industry has been working on. It’s super exciting.”
The studio, designed in partnership with Jack Morton Design, features an LED volume consisting of extended-reality (XR) technology. Fox invested in solutions from Vizrt (11 engines) to render all LED monitoring, Unreal Engine (25 engines) to render all AR and the LED volume, and Stype’s Stypeland for camera tracking of Unreal Engine. The set also uses Stype solutions for multi-display across the LED volume.
Fox Sports will debut a new studio at its Los Angeles facility this Sunday during the return of Fox NFL Sunday. (Photo: Fox Sports)
The studio features new cameras from Grass Valley, new lenses from Canon, and a 24-ft. Technocrane. Four cameras on the set can live-track simultaneously within the LED volume.
“I think that this is probably the most technically challenging set we’ve ever built,” says Fields, who has been with Fox Sports since 2000. “In terms of the amount of LED, the way it’s being used in a live environment and the number of graphics-rendering engines and power out there, it has been no small task. It has taken the whole team here to get it where it’s at.”
Fox Sports has been investing significant effort into integrating Unreal Engine into its studio operations. The broadcaster’s NASCAR set in Charlotte, NC, which opened in 2019, was a major step in Fox’s work in virtual studios. That studio, however used green screen rather than LED. Fields says that, when building the Fox NFL Sunday set, his team favored LED over green screen for the benefit of the talent on the set: Curt Menefee, Terry Bradshaw, Howie Long, Jimmy Johnson, and Michael Strahan.
“I would say that was a big factor in our utilizing LED over green screen,” says Fields. “We’ve been doing green screen for quite some time, and talent get used to it, but, when they’re interacting with anything on the walls, they don’t actually see it. With LED, they do. It’s a little more natural for them, and it’s an easier transition.”
The studio was 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’ve needed every bit of that time and could have used more in understanding how to work with it,” says Fields. “How do cameras get shot in this environment? How do you light subjects and create real-time shadows on a floor? How do you make scenes efficient so that you can have many different ones, because you know you’re going to expand. I couldn’t put a value on at least being given the amount of time that we had because it is new and works totally different. You can’t shoehorn in things like you might have been able to do in the past.”
