OTTAWA — While U.S. voters were watching the presidential election results live on TV in November, several news stations were using graphics and workflow tools from Rocket Surgery, the in-house creative services division of Ottawa-based Ross Video.
Now that the election results have finally been confirmed, Rocket Surgery shared information about their work during the campaign in a press release today.
Rocket Surgery’s clients included: WGN NewsNation (pictured), the nightly news show on WGN America that reaches more than 75 million homes in the U.S.; KXAS-TV/LX, the NBC-owned and operated station serving Dallas-Fort Worth in Texas; WKAQ-TV Telemundo in Puerto Rico; NewsMax; and WFXG Fox 54 News Now in Georgia.
“All of our customers wanted graphics to support their on-air results shows,” said Jim Doyle, director of creative services at Rocket Surgery, “but each customer had slightly different requirements. We helped create a large touchscreen LED display for WGN, whereas KXAS wanted a full virtual set. WKAQ preferred to use augmented reality to deliver the live results and WFXG needed a standard insert package. We’re fortunate to have all these tools at Ross, and plenty of experience using them, so our conversations mostly revolved around the creative look and feel for each customer and how each package would be configured and controlled. It’s always satisfying when we can skip the ‘if’ question and jump straight into the ‘how’.”
Doyle explained Rocket Surgery has been creating elections graphics packages and workflows for many years, but advances in technology, including augmented reality/virtual set (AR/VS) and improved graphics rendering solutions such as Voyager on Unreal, have helped his team do the job more successfully.
“We’re now able to create some impressive and realistic effects that feature maps of the country, virtual legislative chambers, political party heat maps and so on, and we’ve brought these into the studio either as augmented reality graphical elements or rendered them on large LED walls in the studio using XPression. The creative tools we use have improved a lot over the last few years as gaming engine technology has worked its way into broadcast, and that has opened up some amazing possibilities for us,” said Doyle.
One of Rocket Surgery’s clients, Osvaldo Linares, director of production services at Telemundo Puerto Rico, was quoted in the press release as saying: “Everything ran smoothly…I would like to thank you and your staff for all the great work and support during this process through election day. They were very helpful, and their support was beyond our expectations. The augmented reality was produced professionally, and the team were very supportive during our election coverage.”
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