FOX Sports continues to blaze the trail in XR technology and virtual production  with the relaunch of Stage B at its L.A. headquarters early September. Home to FOX NFL Kickoff on Sunday mornings and Colin Cowherd’s The Herd on weekdays, the rebuilt studio is a sprawling LED medium, with all LED supplied by ROE Visual.

The revamp of Stage B follows in the footsteps of FOX’s Stage A, which launched in 2022 and serves as the home to the network’s flagship NFL on FOX pregame show. Previously a practical set, Stage B’s LED volume is more than twice the size of Stage A. The photorealistic environment enables FOX Sports to transform the set backdrop into a virtual representation of any NFL stadium or a variety of other locales, affording infinite opportunities for storytelling and analysis.

“I think with our experience and expertise on both the creative side and the technical side all coming together, we’ve made a lot of strides and we are ready to take the next step,” says Zac Fields, FOX Sports SVP/Graphic Tech & Innovation.
“We’re to the point where, day in and day out, we are comfortable with the workflow and can adapt to last-minute requests. So we felt that we were in an excellent position to move to doing a larger, fully LED-based set for Stage B.”

Stage B will also serve as home to FOX’s MLB Postseason coverage during the Divisional Series this fall and is expected to play a role in other marquee FOX Sports properties like college football and the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

Inside Stage B: A Fully LED-Based Feast for the Eyes 
For Stage B "it was definitely time for an upgrade,” according to Fields. FOX enlisted Architecture Van Brandenburg out of New Zealand to design the virtual environment for FOX NFL Kickoff, while Jack Morton designed The Herd’s on-air look in partnership with ROTU Entertainment.

As opposed to Stage A, which is composed of roughly 1/3 LED medium and 2/3 practical set, Stage B is entirely LED-based. The ROE Visual LED medium is just under 20ft tall and is composed of 42-ft-wide left and right walls, a 72-ft-wide back wall, and a full LED floor. The LED Walls have a pixel count of over 35 million pixels,and the LED Floor has over pixels. ROE Visual delivered over 1100 panels of Black Pearl BP2V2 and nearly 800 panels of Black Marble BM4 LED floor for this project.

“One thing that we realized in using our LED volume on Stage is A was that we wanted to have more space to move around,” says Fields. “If you’re doing entire shows in that LED medium rather than just segments, you really need a larger space so you can have some relationship shots and movement where talent can get up from the desk and walk to another area of the set. So that’s partially why we opted just to do the whole thing as LED rather than a hybrid like stage A.”

The facility is equipped with ten broadcast studio cameras, including eight robotic cameras, a Techno Jib, and a SteadiCam – all equipped with stYpe camera tracking technology for AR graphics.

Behind the Scenes: A Full Battery of Technical Infrastructure Powering It All 
To power Pixotope’s Unreal Engine-based system that feeds content to the XR LED walls, FOX is running 24 high-powered real-time render workstations featuring Megapixel processors. An additional eight high-powered real-time render workstations are on hand to drive the AR camera composition being done with Pixotope’s Unreal Engine-based system.

FOX is also leveraging the same GhostFrame technology it used on Stage A to provide four different tracked/rendered camera perspectives – a feature that has been a hit with production leaders and viewers alike.

“The scale of this project is just massive, so it takes a lot of technical firepower behind the scenes to make it run,” says Fields. “And we had to do some creative engineering with scaling to get to this point.”

In terms of UI, FOX Sports is utilizing Erizos Studio software to control the various components of the XR stage, including both Unreal elements and Vizrt insert graphics. Inside Studio B, The Herd continues to run on Ross Video’s Overdrive production automation system as it did prior to the studio relaunch.

“The LED walls, the AR, and all this other technology are integrated directly into Overdrive and driven by the automation system, which I find pretty impressive to say the least,” says Fields. “Despite this technology being very advanced, our team has been able to take all the different components and graphics elements and automate the entire show. The producer can easily script out their AR and visualize what the set is going to look like. I would say the most underrated part of this project has been putting an automated show on air with this much technical firepower.”

“I’m very grateful that FOX places such a value on innovation for our studio shows and shoulder programming, which is evident here with Studio B,” says Fields. “In terms of what we’ve been able to accomplish, it’s really gratifying to see how much the team has grown from a design and a technical perspective to be able to achieve this.”

Source SVG Jason Dachman, Editorial Director, U.S.