Addressing what it regards as the three major challenges of ‘at-home’ production – latency, transport and control – US eSports’ major game developers and tournament organiser Riot Games has adopted a Calrec RP1 remote broadcast mixing system and Artemis mixing consoles

Riot Games has been pioneering a remote production workflow for its many events worldwide and, with its unique production style, the necessity of using remote trucks have essentially been eliminated. Instead, an ‘at-home’ paradigm has been devised based on Calrec’s RP1.

With all aspects of Riot’s broadcast production, the focus is on constant evolution and iteration in the service of efficiency and resilience. Just as broadcast producers have had to find unique workflows and presentation solutions for individual traditional sports, so too must eSports companies looking for ways to best present their specific competitions.

‘Our workflow is unique to each game,’ says Matthew Donovan, Broadcast Engineering Manager Riot’s West LA production facility. ‘You have to know the game, the capabilities and the limitations, and be embedded with the developers to be able to visually represent that game in an engaging way for its fans. The technical obstacles you need to overcome will be different given different circumstances. The critical part is having a team embedded with the individuality of the games and experiences they’re trying to recreate and working with those challenges to create a good technical solution. But, there’s always a way to improve. There’s always a change that’s going to deliver more value.’

For Riot, solutions manufacturers such as Calrec are making the necessary technologies more accessible: ‘Things that were more challenging are now a lot easier to accomplish,’ Donovan says, referring to the company’s RP1 remote production unit controlled by a Calrec Artemis mixing console. This at-home production workflow supports Riot’s simple philosophy... ‘We try to keep as many people home as possible, so that they can sleep in their beds,’ says audio engineer, Dave Talavera.

Although the company looks to serve the future, some functions are still handled locally at the venues. This includes redundant IFB mixes for the talent and competitors, who are on Dante-enabled wired packs from Studio Technologies, which also feed to the on-site console for fail-safe production. Riot uses Calrec’s new REMI audio products, such as the RP1 remote production unit, which allows latency-free IFBs to be generated at the remote site. These are subsequently controlled by an Artemis mixing console at the LA facility, which uses an in-house Riedel system for VoIP communications with the remote locations.

Working with IP transports requires the production to carefully manage firewalls and potential IP address conflicts. When two back-to-back shows are leapfrogging, relevant production components must be on a separate address for each show. In some cases, Riot uses a 10.22 network, the Class A block of IP space reserved for private networks and assign each path to different addresses, enabling the audio engineers to manage switchovers. As part of its development of this at-home production infrastructure, Riot also adopted a Haivision transport system that significantly reduces bandwidth requirements.

Riot Games is headquartered on a 20-acre campus in West Los Angeles, where one of its buildings houses a fully equipped broadcast facility and maintains 23 other offices worldwide. Production of European competition broadcasts have transitioned to its Berlin-based LoL European Championship (LEC) studio, which features a Calrec Artemis console in the broadcast audio production room. A Calrec Brio in Berlin additionally acts as a monitor console for players, with Cedar Audio audio processing to eliminate crowd noise from their headsets.

‘Riot Games’ ground-breaking IP-based style of production is sure to have a significant impact on the world of broadcasting – beyond just eSports,’ says Calrec VP of Sales, Dave Letson. ‘As one of the first audio companies to invest in the development of remote production, we’re excited to see how our technologies will continue to be integrated into this at-home format. Our RP1 remote production system, now an integral component to broadcasters the world-over, not only helps to minimize costs and increase output, but maintains quality and reliability, making it a perfect complement to this style.’

More: www.calrec.com