Top 5 Ways Virtual Production Can Level Up Your Election Coverage

Election season is a critical time for broadcasters. As voters tune in to get the latest updates, television networks face the challenge of delivering accurate, engaging, and timely election results and content. Virtual production offers a range of tools to help deliver attention-grabbing visuals and easy-to-digest data that keep viewers glued to your channel on election night. 

Let’s take a closer look into how these tools can take your election night coverage from standard to stand out, keeping your audience engaged and informed in real time.

1. Virtual Studios

Virtual studio sets let broadcasters create fully customizable studio environments tailored to any broadcast theme or event. Whether it’s live election coverage or a sports showdown, you can design your entire space to visually align with your content and have it evolve as the story unfolds.

Studio backgrounds like digital twins or city fly-throughs of key locations that play a significant role in the election process, let you instantly connect with your audience and transport them to the event. For MSNBC’s coverage of the U.S. 2022 midterm elections, for example, our broadcast team utilized fly-throughs of a true-to-life digital twin of Washington DC’s National Mall and Capitol Building, including data-driven augmented reality election results that were played out in the virtual space. These visuals could instantly be refreshed to showcase live election data, giving the broadcast a timely, real-world edge.

Meptik’s Emmy-award-winning broadcast graphics team offers project or retainer-based creative services to kick off your election season right.  

Television Networks can also effortlessly shift between different states, showcase live electoral maps, or transition to key battleground areas as results come in. This flexibility is key to keeping a strong, cohesive visual identity that reinforces your network's brand while seamlessly integrating the latest election data.

Virtual Studio sets can be integrated via green screen or LED technology. However, LED technology allows your host to see the environment and content they are interacting with without worrying about green spill or choice of clothing. Lighting and reflections bouncing off LED walls are favored and used as an additional lighting source during production. Extended Reality (XR) technology even allows you to draw outside the lines and extend the virtual set beyond the limitations of the LED wall, into the physical space, meaning you can create vast environments that visually transport the host into completely immersive, virtual locations. 

2. Data Visualization

Real-time data aggregation and visualization play a crucial role in modern election coverage. This is where Disguise’s cloud-based tools Porta, Ipsum, and Chronos come in.

Porta brings serious control and flexibility to election broadcasts, letting you manage any Unreal Engine content—from motion graphics to XR, LED, or AR setups—all from a single web-based interface that you can open and operate from any device. With Porta, you can tweak election visuals in real time, adjusting data displays, screen positions, or even entire content layers as results come in. Porta templates integrate to any data feed seamlessly. It’s designed for collaboration too, allowing multiple users to jump in, each with their own permissions and roles. You don’t need a Designer or Unreal expert on hand daily—Porta’s intuitive interface lets operators handle updates using easy-to-adjust templates. Plus, as a cloud-based control system, it future-proofs your workflow by seamlessly integrating with the latest Unreal Engine into traditional broadcasts. With NRCS and MOS integration, Porta simplifies your newsroom workflow, making collaboration more agile and ensuring your election night coverage runs without a hitch.

Ipsum is your go-to for data feed aggregation, curation, and distribution platform, pulling in large amounts of data from external sources and integrating seamlessly with Porta or directly with Unreal Engine. Whether it’s live election results, sponsorship data, or updates from across the country, Ipsum feeds directly into Porta, allowing operators to validate, push live, or automate the flow into Unreal Engine. This also makes it perfect for automated Master Control tickers, info bars, and election coverage, delivering real-time data to screens instantly. Its integration with Unreal and Viz engines turns raw data into visually compelling graphics, ensuring every feed looks sharp and is broadcast-ready.

Chronos can deliver dynamic election results on an interactive map, timeline analysis, and election-related results like the balance of power, historical comparison, counties, and districts. Chronos seamlessly feeds data into your broadcast studio, allowing anchors to present interactive maps, polls, and winner boards right onto your studio floor using augmented reality (AR). From election night updates to sports stats, Chronos turns complex data into visually compelling graphics.

All three tools enable you to deliver election results in real-time, providing you with interactive data visualizations that tell a story while making complex data easy to digest. You can even simulate potential outcomes —showing what might happen if key states swing one way or another. 

3. Augmented Reality (AR) for Enhanced Storytelling

AR can elevate your election coverage by adding interactive, visually rich layers to your broadcast’s storytelling.

Put AR at the front of your studio to give your audience more depth and make your data visualization pop. Watch live vote tallies come to life with 3D bar graphs rising and falling with each new vote count, or district maps lighting up as winners are announced. Add in AR winner boards that pop up as candidates win critical states or districts.

For the ultimate effect, AR can teleport candidates, analysts, or correspondents into the studio LED, making them appear live without ever being there. AR lets you virtually bring in key players from anywhere in the world, creating the illusion that they’re right there interacting with the hosts. Whether you’re showcasing a candidate for a live interview or having an analyst break down the latest election results, this approach adds a futuristic, engaging touch to your election coverage.

4. Remote Live Production Integration

If you’re not ready to teleport your correspondents into the studio, seamlessly integrating live footage from their location into the virtual environment is just as effective. 

Using picture-in-picture (PiP) windows, you can bring live video feeds of your remote reporters and guests directly into your broadcast, placing them directly within your virtual LED studio. Using LED makes it possible for your presenter to have a more natural, face-to-face conversation with your remote guests. Whether it’s an on-the-ground report from a key election site or real-time analysis from experts across the country, this integration allows for smooth transitions and cohesive visuals. Disguise’s system can simultaneously bring any number of live feeds to your LED wall. This is a major win during election season when you need real-time, coordinated inputs from multiple sources to keep the coverage flowing.

5. Cloud-Based Workflows for Scalability

Cloud-based workflows supercharge virtual production by offering scalability, remote access, and efficient live content management, making them an essential part of today’s broadcast toolkit.

One of the standout features in Disguise’s workflow is the multi-editing tool, where multiple operators can jump into a project simultaneously, all syncing back to a central hub managed by the director. Everyone works from an exact project copy, meaning real-time collaboration is smooth and fast. Media content may need to be copied manually, but the rest syncs automatically—letting four to five people work on the same virtual studio project at once. This drastically speeds up setup times and cuts down costs—seriously boosting efficiency for live events like election night. Plus, our support can access and edit files remotely, providing you with 24/7 support when you need it

Porta, Ipsum, and Chronos can also be accessed and managed from the cloud, or be installed on-prem, depending on your preference. 

From AR-enhanced election coverage to seamless remote collaboration and data integration, these technologies streamline workflows, reduce setup time, and bring a whole new level of flexibility to broadcast coverages. 

Meptik has an Emmy-winning creative team and is backed by Disguise, the leading platform for visual experience, providing the most advanced tools for broadcasters available. Contact our team today to get started.