Stadium Series and Unreal HDR
We had the pleasure this year to continue our AR graphics for ESPN's coverage of the NHL's Stadium Series. This time in Tampa Bay.
A Fun New Package
Because Tampa bay is home to the Buccaneers NFL team, the entire stadium series event was pirate themed. This allowed for some rather wild and fun Unreal graphics we wouldn't typically get to make.
Native HDR
One of the most exciting aspects of this broadcast is that the entire thing is in HDR. I briefly mentioned at my UE Fest 2025 talk about the potential for Unreal and HDR, but I'll break it down here:
The usual way for realtime graphic engines to achieve HDR is via a LUT, both NBC (Broadcast of Thursday Night Football), and ESPN both have preferred LUTs they use for converting an SDR render from a realtime graphics engine to HDR. The issue with the LUT approach is it is applied at the last stage of rendering before output, so while the result is "Technically" HDR, there is nothing gained from it when compared to its SDR variation. This is the same for AJA's downstream colour box.
Unreal, thanks to the integration of OpenColorIO and being able to specify a working color space, allows the engine to work in HDR from the very beginning of the pipeline. Thus, rather than "Upscaling" to HDR, we are just producing HDR natively from the get-go.
Now there is nothing inherently wrong with the LUT approach, no one is complaining that the lower third or score bug arn't "HDR" enough. However, when it comes to graphics that are not purely informational, and that blend visual spectacle and AR graphics together.
The fire would look rather dull if it weren't rendered in actual HDR.
Sadly i was not able to be onsite for this production dues to visa delays (government shutdowns and all that) but i supported remotely as well as leading the team on integration and creation of the graphics in Unreal.
You can see the full AR graphics package as well as your offline work here: