How Canon kit brought two different productions to life for the gaming industry

The Golden Joystick Awards are well known in the gaming community, being the world's longest-running publicly voted gaming awards. Rising production company Racquet Studios was commissioned to live-stream the 2024 Golden Joystick Awards event, and chose a range of Canon kit to do the job. Following this, the company filmed the Future Games Show, a pre-recorded event but filmed as live, relying on some of the same Canon kit. Here's how the Canon cameras and technologies facilitated both productions.

The 41st annual Golden Joystick Awards event was live-streamed from a central London hotel. This was a demanding task in itself, but this year there was an extra challenge: the awards were being held as an in-person event for the first time since 2019, before the Covid pandemic, and the organisers wanted to replicate the look and feel of the virtual events that had been held online-only over the pandemic period.

Those virtual events featured lavish virtual environments, the graphical style of which the production company had to recreate. At the same time, it had to combine this with a stage to accommodate the live presenters and guests and even a live musical performance. To add to the challenge, the whole event was to be live-streamed over multiple platforms, with no possibility of post-production.

Simon Skinner, Racquet Studios' Managing Director, reveals how they did it, with insights from Rob Ruardy, Technical Director, and Josh Lewis, Production Director.

"The set was a 14-metre-wide LED volume with a bespoke tiered stage, which produced a completely immersive production," Simon says.

To capture the action, Simon and his crew devised a six-camera setup using Canon kit. The main cameras were three Canon CR-N500 PTZ cameras, mounted on the ceiling of the event venue so they could get a clear shot despite the crowd of people present. "Floor mounted cameras would have been completely impractical in such a crowded room," Josh explains, "so the PTZ cameras were a real win." With their pan, tilt and 15x optical zoom capability, the three cameras between them covered the entire presentation space.

At the sides of the stage were two Canon XF605 professional camcorders mounted on tripods, each with a camera operator, ready to follow everything that happened on stage while remaining comparatively unobtrusive. Together with the PTZ cameras, this setup provided all the angles required, from wide-angle to close-up shots.

Finally, a Canon EOS C70 on a gimbal acted as a roving camera, providing walking shots through the room, capturing the reactions of people in the audience, candid moments and cutaways when needed.

All six cameras were managed remotely using a Canon RC-IP1000 controller, to which they connected using Canon's XC Protocol. This can control up to 200 cameras, and was used to configure the camera exposure, focus and settings remotely as required.

Following their experience with the Golden Joystick Awards, Racquet Studios produced the Spring edition of the quarterly Future Games Show, GamesRadar's flagship digital games showcase, reaching a global audience of almost 10 million viewers.

"This was an entirely different animal," Simon comments – a pre-recorded studio-based virtual production rather than a live event – but it too was to be shot in front of a virtual set and filmed as live. For this, Rob says, "to avoid moiré, we decided not to use LED backgrounds – even when you're just lighting a pure green background, it can still be an issue no matter what camera you're using. It also requires a lot of computing power to render three LED walls, synchronised all at once. We decided to go the green screen route as we were able to use Blackmagic Ultimatte compositors to composite the feeds in real time and get a similar result."

The show was shot in-studio against an 8-metre-wide chroma green cove. It utilised virtual production in a multi-cam green screen setup with a virtual background created in Unreal Engine.

The A-cam was a Canon EOS C500 Mark II cinema camera paired with a Canon CN-E 45-135mm T2.4 L F / FP Flex Zoom lens and mounted on a jib arm, with a wireless teleprompter.

The advanced lens metadata support in Canon Flex Zoom lenses includes Cooke /i Technology and Zeiss eXtended Data protocols, and the lens fed this direct to a connected tracker module in real time, enabling complete precision and accuracy.

For close-up cameras, the shoot used two Canon CR-N500 PTZ cameras, positioned at either side. Each was controlled wirelessly from a dedicated controller – in this case, one was a Canon RC-IP100 and the other a Canon RC-IP1000. The team chose these cameras because of their experience with the awards show: "The PTZ cameras interested us in the virtual reality space because of the 3D motion data that they could output," Rob explains. They also feature the essential FreeD Protocol to seamlessly send camera position and lens data to Unreal Engine without the need of a tracking device.

"This relieved a lot of the challenges that come with using multiple camera tracking solutions for such productions."

The team anticipated that it would be a real test integrating the PTZ cameras with the Canon Cinema EOS kit, Josh says. A consistent look across the cameras was critical, but again Canon's colour science delivered all that was required, combined with the cameras' extensive connectivity options including XLR, HDMI and SDI. The PTZ cameras output 4K UHD natively, and the EOS C500 Mark II's range of recording formats includes 4K UHD oversampled from the 5.9K full frame sensor, which suppresses moiré and reduces noise, resulting in a superior quality image.

The studio setup included a custom lighting rig that produced dynamic, image-based lighting fed by Unreal Engine in real time, Rob adds. "It was all driven by Disguise RX-2 and VX-2 media servers, which also managed all camera calibrations, Unreal Engine pipelines, and live green screen extension matting for extending our green cove beyond its physical size in the studio."

Rob praises the performance of the CN-E 45-135mm T2.4 L F / FP lens, with its "incredible T2.4 across the entire focal length and its cinematic look, which enables you to throw an LED screen just off focus, to avoid any moiré – it's a beautiful piece of glass, and incredibly useful for virtual production."

Simon adds that Racquet Studios has recently been pairing the lens with the Canon EOS C400, which alongside the EOS C80 supports even more camera and lens data for virtual production and VFX thanks to CV Protocol.

"The EOS C400 is a total game-changer for the virtual production market," he says. "We're really excited to use it more in different productions."

Racquet Studios started off as a traditional creative agency, producing product photography, corporate videos and the like, and expanded into virtual production when projects were paused or cancelled over the pandemic period.

"A lot of others in virtual production come from a tech-first background. Racquet's key distinction is that we come from a creative-first background," says Simon.

It is from this perspective that the production team approach choosing kit: what can help them bring their creative vision to life?

"We work with a few tech partners, but we've got this kind of love affair with Canon," adds Simon.

As the virtual production industry grows, it will no doubt face new challenges, just as Racquet Studios did in live-streaming the 41st Golden Joystick Awards and filming the Future Games Show in a virtual set. But Simon is confident that Canon kit will help them meet such challenges. "Canon's solutions have been constantly evolving, recognising the problems and bringing products to market to assist us and make our lives easier."