Latin America. Brainstorm has supplied a series of equipment and virtual production solutions at Warner Media's facilities in Argentina and Chile, which makes the entity a pioneer in the advanced use of virtual tools in the southern cone.
This consolidates the company as the undisputed leader in the region in terms of generating high-level hyper-realistic television content, thanks to the symbiosis of the advanced technology of the Spanish company with the creativity of the qualified staff of the channel's graphic department in Chile.
The project was initiated at the end of 2018 by Videomedia, Chilean representative of Brainstorm, and executed by Warner Media in mid-2019. The regional guidelines have been led by Alexis Collao, Director of Broadcast Technology of Warner Media in Latin America, who together with an interdisciplinary team, projected the use of virtual studios as a medium and long-term solution as a mechanism to achieve greater efficiency in the ROI related to the production of content.
In an effort between the Graphic Area (which already provided solutions to all areas of the channel), Engineering and the collaboration of Brainstorm, two laboratories were launched over the last two years, with the aim of practicing, evaluating the possibilities and tacitly comparing each virtual tool available on the market.
The first augmented and virtual reality laboratory had excellent results, so much so that the executive staff of the channel decided to allocate a budget to the project. The equipment supplied is identical and in both Chile and Argentina consists of three InfinitySet + Track with Unreal Engine, an InfinitySet Controller with Unreal Engine, two design systems with InfinitySet Edit with Aston Designer and Unreal Engine, and an OnDemand.
The graphic team focused on generating an efficient production chain for the development of sets in Unreal Engine 4, assigning a team of five designers to generate multiple scenarios both exterior and interior. The approval of the budget and the purchase of Brainstorm's solutions meant enhancing a figure that linked the real-time potential of Unreal Engine through photorealism and top-level blueprints with the operation of Infinity Set.
The second laboratory, started at the end of 2019, provided Warner Media with a range of possibilities to articulate the figure of this Unreal Engine 4 + InfinitySet integrator, which resulted in the first air broadcasts with a case of Fernanda Maciel and Congress Data for CNN Chile and Chilevisión in trackfree mode.
At the beginning of 2020 Warner Media defined the physical place where the virtual production set would be installed: a space that was intended as a props warehouse and that, however, was reassigned due to the good results of the second laboratory. In February, by Brainstorm, the training course was given to the operators of Warner Media and the installation of the final equipment was carried out together with the integration of Ncam.
In October Warner Media broadcast for the first time live and live the preview of the football teams of Chile and Uruguay, using UE4 sets, actors, cameras and screens integrated from InfinitySet and a camera with Ncam tracking, thus demonstrating the leadership of Warner Media in its channels TNT Sports-Chilevisión, the impact was such that heads of the dramatic area of teleseries have been very interested in this solution, expanding the future possibilities of the project.
"In the more than 2 years that we have been working with the implementation of virtual studios, we have made considerable progress towards reaching the maturity of the project, so we have already launched programs with virtual scenography on the air with great success. In the USA, Virtual Studios have become an industry standard and this year in particular, within the strategic priorities of WM's International Technology area is the adoption of these technologies at the local level, which is presented as a challenge that in the region we have been able to develop successfully, "says Alexis Collao.
According to Sergio Amuchastegui, head of sales of Brainstorm in the region "at a strategic and commercial level we are very pleased with the results obtained so far by our business partners, which have been achieved with local support by César Núñez, a key element in this implementation. During the pandemic we have provided them with more than 15 Brainstorm Suite licenses between Chile and Argentina as extraordinary support so that those involved can work from home; we expect to be able to reactivate the second and third stages in 2021 according to the information they provide us."
