Feeling the NRG: Riot Games puts on a show for Valorant Champions Paris final

After more than three weeks of intense gaming in the French capital, Valorant Champions Paris reached a dramatic conclusion at the Accor Arena on Sunday 5 October, with North America’s NRG beating Europe’s Fnatic 3-2.

A packed arena and audiences around the world enjoyed not just high-energy gaming but an opening ceremony featuring performances from 347aidan, templuv, Qing Madi, and 8AE.

For organiser Riot Games, the focus throughout the tournament was creating and distributing a fan-centric event that leads the way when it comes to engagement and technical innovation. To achieve this, a whole host of technology was deployed on site, while production and distribution was handled out of the company’s Dublin Remote Broadcast Center Powered by AWS (RBC).

Some 73 cameras were deployed to capture the in-arena action, including 33 for the world feed and opening ceremony. For the opening ceremony this included a Motion Impossible Agito Sport camera on stage that captured close-up shots of the artists while remaining out of view of the audience. Other speciality cameras included an ARRI Trinity, Steadicam and Moviebird 50XL, as well as a winchcam which hung in the centre of the stage, capturing unique overhead shots of both teams for use in between rounds.

Many of the cameras used by Riot are Sony. This included the use of two Venice cameras with a very specific shutter angle during the opening ceremony to capture laser effects synchronised to music creating an almost AR effect. Other Sony units included P50s, 3500s and FX3s. Ten Bradley Micro PTZs were focused on the gamers themselves.

All of this meant there was no shortage of content available for the replay operators based in Dublin who were charged with finding unique and informative angles to enhance the storytelling.

“We have four XT-Vias just doing replays on this show,” explains Alex Rybalko, senior manager, broadcast engineering, Riot Games. “They’ll be taking in 40 different angles and they’ll cut packages. We also use the EVS Xtra Motion super-slow mo.”

“It’s a really replay-intense show, the game rounds go for two to three minutes, then there’s a 30 second reset. So every two minutes, the EVS team is putting a two- or three-play package together to use during the reset,” adds James Wyld, principal infrastructure engineer, Riot Games. “The replay operators are really skilled players because they are taking a different view of the game. They’re looking for what was interesting across all 10 player viewpoints.”

The replay team works alongside a team of on-site observers, experienced esports players who closely watch all the action and decide what’s worth showing in real time.

Wyld adds: “It’s a pretty intense process. The observers run two computers, one screen has more information and one is much cleaner. The clean one is our actual camera in the game, and it’s configured to follow the observer’s view, so they [the observer] can have all of the tools, all the extra text information in front of them on screen, but that doesn’t get relayed to broadcast. Then we’ve got the clean observer PC beside them, and that’s the one we capture the camera out from, which then gets fed into the flypack.”

In addition to the on-site team, 48 people worked on the tournament in the Dublin RBC and whether events are handled out of Dublin or the RBC in Seattle, the intention is to keep the processes and the technology as simple and standardised as possible.

Rybalko explains: “The philosophy is to keep them exactly the same, because we want people to be familiar with the product whether they’re doing a show in Seattle or Dublin. We built Dublin first, so there was a lot of learnings, but that was by design. We wanted to go into this bleeding edge tech with a smaller basket, and then once we worked out some of the bugs and had our learnings, we applied that for the build in Seattle and then retrofitted that back to Dublin, because we definitely want to keep it in sync. These shows move around the world. Last year, this exact show was (produced from) Seattle . This year it’s here and in Dublin, so we want to make sure that the talent that we build up with our staff and our partners, we can continue to utilise it instead of having to rebuild it every time.”

This year, the technical setup has been enhanced by the addition of a new ST 2110 flypack. “These kits that are traveling for the shows could be hanging off either facility. So anytime you’ve got the kit and the facility interacting you want that to always be the same. Tally is a great example. It’s the thing no one thinks about until you really need it – so making sure that when the switcher in Dublin or Seattle is cutting, we’re lighting up cameras correctly in the facility or on site,” adds Wyld.

Finals also have the added complexity of an opening ceremony, which means also thinking about compatibility with third-party vendors.

Rybalko says: “It gets very complicated because even though the opening ceremony and the main show are distinct, we share a lot of the resources. So we have to figure out, how do we integrate with a third-party vendor who’s providing us with the opening ceremony facilities, but then that’s going to go into the main show as well. We need to make sure that not only are we pushing the envelope in terms of what we do, but we’re keeping in mind that we have to be compatible with a lot of the long-standing vendors that we work with too.”

Audio also plays a key role in the esports experience, whether that’s the fully integrated comms infrastructure or the powerful bass-heavy in-stadium sound. Players are also miced up and there’s a desk dedicated to mixing players’ in ears and microphones. Riedel’s Bolero wireless intercom system is at the heart of the setup, with 186 Bolero beltpacks, 50 Bolero antennas and 120 Riedel intercom panels all utilised. More than 50 commentary/host microphones and 30 wireless mics were also deployed.

Wyld explains: “The player comms are all going to EVS as well. We can play out if the players have said something interesting, or talked to each other, we’ve got that recorded, and with the player screens, we’re feeding a multiview back from the broadcast system for the competitive side.

“The players themselves actually have two different layers of audio – over ears, which we usually play static through, but then they’ve got in ears as well. They can hear everything that’s going on in the arena, so to maintain competitive integrity, we need to block that out so that’s why it has to be mixed separately, and it’s a completely isolated situation.”

Read more Riot Games streamlines production of Valorant Champions Paris with ST 2110 flypack

With esports attracting a global audience, content from Paris went out in fifteen languages including English, with six broadcasting locally on site. As Riot moves to ST 2110 this is just one aspect of the production that is being streamlined.

Rybalko says: “We can basically have a small control room in a box, and with just a couple of network switches they get all of the video feeds through it. It takes us an hour to set up all of the software compared with before when it was a lot of rentals going from different places that you have to configure. This way, we’re modularising even from a language process and the teams get more resources and they get it faster, so they can have a better production for their region as well.”

“We need to make sure that not only are we pushing the envelope in terms of what we do, but we’re keeping in mind that we have to be compatible with a lot of the long-standing vendors that we work with too”

When it comes to the network, around 70 switches are deployed in the infrastructure support network and around 20 in the core kit.

Wyld: “We’ve got around 1,200 clients on the network, between staff, phones, laptops. So we’ve got plenty of horsepower, and we only have a few days to set it up. Ultimately the network has to go up before anyone can really do any work, so our team only has two or three days to get in, get the switches thrown out, and get the boxes thrown out. And that’s why this concept we have of the 16 field boxes is so good because we can just throw it down, connect some fibre into it, and go.”

The 16 field boxes are deployed around the venue. “They’ve got a multiplexed relay from the core of our kit for video, so we have a bunch of SDI spigots on the back that we can basically take what’s in our kit and expose it anywhere in the venue on one of these. And it’s also got a network switch in it, so we can immediately uplink anything via network or video straight back into the core of our kit,” he adds.

For productions of this scale, network security is also a challenge, but the expertise across Riot means it’s one that can be met.

Rybalko continues: “This is one of the benefits we have in Riot, in that we’re actually a tech company with a side hobby in broadcast. The advantage there, when it comes to things like network security, policy, management, that kind of stuff, is that we have entire divisions of the company dedicated to that. “

Physical security is also tight when it comes to the servers on site for events such as this, with personnel guarding the server rack throughout the tournament and only a limited number of people allowed access.

While this tournament has seen innovation in terms of Riot’s move to ST 2110-based field kits, as is to be expected, there is more to come.

Wyld says: “We have some ideas already based on our experience loading in these kits. But I think for us, it’s really kind of coalescing and realising that this is v1 of this model, where 2110 is widely deployed. We’re now interconnecting these racks with the network. But now, as we gain experience in the field, we can start to move that right out towards the edge. So previously, it hasn’t been possible for us to run 2110 cameras or 2110 monitoring out in that area, but with these deployable field boxes that’s ready to switch over. So we can now start to say, right, if we’ve got 80 network switches deployed on site, that means we can just put a 2110 decoder on one of them, and then we might have four signals available. It could be any signal in the kit,in Dublin, or in the world.”

Rybalko concludes: “Our focus is on building the platform that’s really future proof and leading edge, but not on innovation for the sake of it. It’s purposeful innovation.”