disguise powers giant video display for eSports Championship Series

eSports Championship Series (ECS) Season 7, the latest iteration of the world’s most-watched CS:GO (Counter-Strike: Global Offensive) tournament, took place earlier this year, culminating in a four-day final in June at The SSE Arena, Wembley, London. The 16 groups that started the event were gradually reduced to four teams, which then battled through a knock-out competition to determine the season’s champions.

The tournament was run by FACEIT, a competitive gaming platform for online multiplayer PvP gamers, which boasts more than eight million users and 12 million online gaming sessions each month.

disguise rental and studio partner, Bluman Associates, was commissioned by FACEIT to provide a 4K video display solution and management for the event. Bluman Associates has a disguise rental fleet including gx 1, gx 2 and solo servers — as well as the newest addition to their fleet, the gx 2c, which was used to power the ECS Season 7 tournament.

“We were keen to have the gx 2c servers on the project as it was the first opportunity we had to use them,” said Simon Hudson, project manager, Bluman Associates. “They performed very well, and we didn’t even get the chance to push them to their full capability on this occasion.”

The gx 2c servers feature two HDMI 2.0 VFC cards. Two 4K@60 feeds were required for the production, simplifying the video signal pipeline. The gaming aspect of the project relied heavily on HTML5, and disguise’s Web module enabled the FACEIT Dev team to send five live2k HTML5 Rasta over a pre-rendered wireframe, programmed with data such as pod sizes and video screen layout. This allowed team logos, scores, statistics and maps of different scenes to be routed to the relevant pod, enabling the audience to keep up to date with competition information in real-time.

The project also included live camera feeds from broadcast, including player cams and IMAG relays which were sent over 3G HD-SDI. Live gameplay events were sent via OSC to disguise, triggering a MultiTransport event; for example, in-game bombs exploding on-screen, illuminating the audience in digitised flames.