The Quanta Story
VP for Broadcast - “The Natural Next Step”
If innovation is the goal, then one of the top players likely to put the ball in the back of the net is Amazon Prime and in 2025 they’ve done just that. Football (soccer to some…) is the national sport of Brazil, and for Amazon’s coverage of two of the country’s biggest competitions, Copa Do Brasil and Campeonato Brasileiro Série A, they decided to deliver all the pre-game, halftime and post-match analysis programming from an entirely virtual set using Virtual Production (VP). To find out why the move to VP was an open goal rather than a risky tackle, we stopped by to visit Quanta Studios in São Paulo.
An Opportunity to Do Something More Dynamic
The São Paulo studio lot is one of three owned and operated by Estúdios Quanta across Brazil, with other sites in Rio de Janeiro and Paulínia. The São Paulo site boasts nine soundstages supporting traditional filming techniques, greenscreen and LED wall photography, and Quanta has a long history of hosting film, television and commercial shoots for productions across the full range of the entertainment industry. However, as Tieres Tavares, Director at Quanta explains, their move into live broadcast was relatively recent. “We started with traditional broadcasting, doing live operations for sports broadcast, back at the beginning of 2023. However, we had already been working with Virtual Production for the entertainment industry since 2017, mostly for TV shows, feature films and streaming channels.”
It turns out that Quanta is far more than a soundstage studio lot. They have an entire department dedicated to innovation, applying and integrating new technologies, all headed up by Diogo Costa, the Creative Director of Technologies.
“Because of Diogo's expertise in Virtual Production, we always looked at broadcasting as the next natural step,” says Tieres. Diogo smiles modestly, “We always saw VP as an opportunity to do something more dynamic, where we could play more with the assets.”
The Most Efficient Route
Whatever industry you’re in, innovation can be difficult when potential collaborators are used to a set way of working, as Tieres acknowledges.
“Of course, producers have more confidence working in a way that they're familiar with, but it's just a matter of time, once they recognise all the new possibilities. Let's say we start with augmented reality, introducing those elements, right? We can already see that they're getting more creative, starting to visualise the possibilities either with editorial content or advertising. Inevitably, advertisers will also see the possibilities and they will want to bring their assets into play in more vivid and dynamic ways.”
Tieres explains that one of the keys to innovation may, unexpectedly, be patience.
“We always understand and respect what our clients want and need, so it takes time to ensure that any client feels comfortable and can see that VP is a viable, reliable solution.”
So how did this switch to VP, for Amazon Prime’s Brazilian football coverage, come about?
“It was the team at Amazon Prime that suggested the possibility,” Diogo jumps in enthusiastically. “They had seen what we had done on other projects, using Virtual Production techniques, and they wanted to have a consistent look and feel for their sports studio sets that could be replicated across different territories.”
Like the referee, a whistle is blown and Tieres steps in to explain that, beyond the creative benefits of VP, everyone must still play by the rules.
“They asked straight out - ‘Okay, so, give us the costings to keep the physical set and make some improvements, or the cost to revamp the whole thing and go 100% Virtual Production.”
It turns out that if consistently high production values across a global schedule of programming and content is the target, then VP is an ideal choice, combining cost-effective efficiency with creative freedom.
“The Amazon Prime team recognised that the most efficient route to achieve their goal would be with VP because they could use the same set design across different territories and then customise it, in this case, to give it a Brazilian flavour.”
As the cost of materials, storage and logistics continue to increase, and productions become ever more conscious of their environmental impact, the sustainability benefits of Virtual Production will become more and more appealing. However, VP for broadcast requires more than willing production partners – it requires a rock-solid infrastructure that is as reliable as traditional broadcast systems.
Team Players
Many players will wait for kick-off before they start playing, but for Diogo, Virtual Production is a team sport, so he reached out early for some development partners to make sure his team would be match fit.
“We had already started to develop strategies for bringing VP into live broadcast the previous year and by partnering with Mo-Sys when we did, we had the opportunity to develop on a broader level, in a more efficient way, building their systems into our pipeline at a research and development stage.”
Working with Mo-Sys, Diogo and his team were able to harness Mo-Sys hardware and software to develop Quanta’s three-camera setup – one static camera and two cameras tracked with StarTracker technology, but crucially, they also chose to integrate Mo-Sys VP Pro software into their workflow as it still allows them direct access to Unreal Engine.
“For all our previous Virtual Production Projects, we had been working directly in the Unreal Engine, without an intermediate. With VP Pro, it’s not a black box - we are still able to use our switchboards, perforce, and all the logic that we have developed for cinema and series, bringing them into broadcast. This is very good for us because every new production will have different requirements, so we can adapt each project to meet individual client needs.”
For Diogo and his team this flexibility is crucial to deliver the production values expected by the Amazon Prime audience.
“We use all the VP Pro tools, but it is also open to us if we need to create a new foreground, background, or garbage matte - we can decide everything. We have the space to create everything that we want.” Diogo jumps in, enthusiastically.
The Quanta team were able to achieve this level of technical freedom by working hand-in-hand with Mo-Sys technicians and engineers to develop the new pipeline.
“We developed everything together, from testing and camera setup to lens calibration, render node configurations, mapping out the complete operation,” Diogo explains. “We were able to talk with Mo-Sys developers. We had specific requirements and the team were able to develop some additional code which we would test and give feedback on, developing and growing the system and the project together.”
The Confidence to Innovate
For every match, there’s the physical game and there’s the mental game, and as Tieres explains, for Quanta, the choice of partners was about more than hardware and software tools.
“One of the key factors that helped us decide to work with Mo-Sys was the extremely high level of confidence we had thanks to the quality of the support. We felt like Mo-Sys were holding our hand along the way, moving with us.”
With a partnership for development, as well as support, Quanta had a reliable system that was ready and capable to deliver for the live sports coverage, but that doesn’t mean that they were in any way complacent when it comes to live broadcast and streaming, as Diogo attests. “The system we developed is very robust. Of course, we always had a backup running, but we never needed to use it.”
So how is the system now, with the final whistle blown on the first round of match coverage complete?
“The system, the hardware, VP Pro, it’s all good,” says Diogo. “It’s running fast and connected 24/7, working very well. Now we can start to explore, by increments, how the studio can deliver new levels of interaction with the talent. Now that it is set up and proven to be reliable, the studio is opening new possibilities. It can be a little more like a canvas, where we can have graphics that explain and complement what the talent is saying.”
However, with the next round of matches fast approaching, Diogo is taking a cautious and tactical approach to the next wave of innovations for their VP broadcasting.
“The system is robust and reliable, so now it is about making everyone feel safe, from Amazon, to the director, the talent and even the camera operators. As they get used to the system we can add more features, feeling confident to find new ways of working within the studio - new shots and camera movements, talent interactions with the LED screen, etc.”
The Next Natural Next Step
With both Copa Do Brasil and Campeonato Brasileiro Série A set to resume very soon, Diogo is focussing on maintaining smooth operations for the upcoming coverage as part of this groundbreaking collaboration between Quanta and Amazon Prime. Tieres, however, can look a little further into the future, and already has his next goal in mind…
“Obviously each project has its own needs, right? We also need to consider flexibility. The more that we have everything interconnected, the easier it will be for us to meet those needs. You could move much faster, carrying out multiple different projects. On one stage we could be doing soccer today, and tomorrow we could go back to that same stage and do basketball, or surfing!”
The benefits of virtual sets over physical ones are obvious, with less waste, lower costs and much faster turnarounds, so with a constant need to meet increasing demand for high-quality content, Virtual Production is the next natural step, delivering higher production values faster and more efficiently, without limiting creativity.
