Time-lapse video of built of ESPN’s Studio W
Marking the launch of ESPN’s most technologically advanced studio ever built, Studio W in ESPN’s Digital Center 2 made its on-air debut Saturday, Aug. 29, during ABC college football halftime and wraps coverage. Studio W — the former home of NFL studio coverage and dedicated to Chris Berman and Tom Jackson in 2017 — is one of ESPN’s flagship studios and has been rebuilt entirely from the ground up.
Studio W will become the permanent home of NFL Live (weekdays, 4 p.m. ET) beginning Wednesday, Sept. 9, and will also serve as the centerpiece studio for college football and NHL programming, as well as Fantasy Focus Countdown on NFL Sundays.
“Studio W represents the next chapter in how ESPN brings sports to life,” said Tony Lacaprucia, Sr. Director, ESPN Studio Operations. “Over the past eight months, teams across ESPN and the Walt Disney Company came together to build a studio designed not just for today’s productions, but for the future of live sports storytelling, with 148 million pixels, real-time virtual environments, advanced camera technologies, display automation and an entirely new lighting complement.”
“The vision for Studio W required capabilities that didn’t exist in off-the-shelf solutions. We needed a platform that could support multiple camera perspectives, operate at the scale of our LED volume, integrate with our production workflows and meet the reliability demands of live sports,” said Jason Black, Sr. Manager, Product Software Engineering, Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product and Technology. “By working closely with Pixotope and building a custom integration, we created a solution tailored to ESPN’s needs that gives us the flexibility to continue developing proprietary tools and experiences on top of a robust rendering platform.”
The reimagined studio can render any virtual environment, from a football stadium to a purpose-built custom setting in real time, shifting between them instantly without altering a single physical element. Analysts can break down plays surrounded by large-scale 3D visualizations that appear to physically occupy the space beside them, not as graphics layered on top of the image.
“The biggest challenge was enabling multiple cameras to shoot the same virtual environment simultaneously while maintaining perfect synchronization and image quality,” said Jeremiah Swartz, Lead Product Software Engineer, Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product and Technology. “That required tightly integrating camera tracking, rendering, LED displays and real-time data systems, giving production teams far greater freedom to capture dynamic shots without compromising realism.”
“Following creative development discussions with the ESPN Directing and Sports & News & Information Production leadership, ESPN Studio Design & Development contracted production design firm Jack Morton Worldwide to design a space with sweeping architecture to capture the energy of sports arenas within our 8,900-square-foot Studio W,” said Joe Ferretti, Director, Studio Design and Development. “The forward-looking design blends cutting-edge technology with a modern aesthetic to create a living, adaptable space to enhance our storytelling capabilities.”
ESPN Creative Studio, the in-house creative agency and visual-design organization, also played a key role in the development of Studio W, creating the XR scene creative, studio environment designs, sales and integration elements, and the technology workflows that bring the space to life.
“Without an existing playbook to follow, the power of cross-departmental collaboration brought together expertise and ambition around a shared creative vision,” said Lucas Nickerson, Sr. Creative Director. “Building this studio gave us the opportunity to rethink how we approach storytelling, particularly on the XR stage, and develop creative that not only meets the needs of today but also reflects where our creative ambitions are headed.”
Studio W by the numbers
148 million pixels total
Studio W encompasses more than 9,200 square feet of LED displays, anchored by a purpose-built XR volume featuring roughly 44.7 million pixels alone. Desk displays and large-format touchscreens bring the studio’s full pixel count to more than 148 million.
Bristol’s first 1080p HDR and UHD production studio
Studio W is the first facility in Bristol capable of 1080p HDR and UHD production, running on a full SMPTE ST 2110 infrastructure, delivering sharper images, richer color and a more cinematic picture quality across every ESPN platform.
A camera system built from scratch
Using Sony HDC 5500 cameras and a custom integration developed at ESPN’s direction, the system renders multiple perspectives of the same virtual world simultaneously, cycling them onto the LED walls at up to 480Hz. Up to four cameras can shoot the same XR volume at once, with each camera locked to its own dedicated slice of the rendering cycle, each seeing only its intended image.
Building Studio W
Studio W was designed and constructed by teams spanning ESPN Studio Operations, The Walt Disney Company Technology, ESPN Creative Studio and additional internal groups. Engineers custom-built the rendering pipeline and rewired the entire studio. Designers reimagined the space from an aesthetic standpoint. The collaboration required eight months of work and represents one of the most complex studio builds in ESPN’s history.