CCTV – Camkoon

Optimizing production costs with InfinitySet Lite

First Class is an entertainment TV show broadcasted by CCTV, the Chinese public television, each year in the evening of September 1st, coinciding with the first day of classes for the Primary School students.

First Class is an educational show that takes place once a year, and as the Chinese government suggests that students should watch it, this contributes in making it one of the most viewed and relevant shows on CCTV, reaching extremely high audience ratings year after year. This 2019, CCTV chose Camkoon as the production company, mainly in charge of the augmented reality and graphics content.

Camkoon is one of the most important and renowned production companies in the Chinese market, which mainly services CCTV and many regional television stations. Camkoon have a large design and support team, and their design business covers Virtual Studios, AR graphics, touch screens, videowalls, post-production, editing, finishing and much more.

For First Class, Camkoon decided to use InfinitySet as the main solution to support the show. The production used AR graphics in 3 different parts of the show. The first is a song for the Chinese Mountaineering team that celebrates their achievements, so the AR is all about huge mountains. The second part is a talk show that emphasizes some of the important achievements of the Chinese space flight and aviation, and in which the anchor is Sabeining, a very famous talent in China. The third part is driven by Chinese aviation specialist Sunzezhou, who presented an interesting story about ‘Chang e’ and ‘Yu tu’, the two space rovers that landed on the Moon on the latest Chinese mission to the dark side of Earth’s satellite.

For the live show, Camkoon used two InfinitySet virtual set solutions with two tracked cameras in tripods. Most of the AR graphics were designed with Aston, which were also combined with models created with Unreal Engine for showing ‘Yu tu’ on the stage, since it featured over ten different skeleton animations, that required a combined render. This also implied that some essential models were created using PBR materials, to match the image quality of the Unreal Engine rendering. In addition to the tracked tripods, Camkoon also used InfinitySet’s TeleTransporter to simulate crane camera flies during the show.

To know more about this project, please download the case study.