What's new?

We're excited to present Pixotope 26.3, introducing support for OGraf rendering in VideoIO and template control in Live Controller, an upgrade to Unreal Engine 5.8.3, the new free Pixotope Discovery tier, and the foundations for a video wall solution, alongside Pixotope Zone on Windows. It also brings a broad set of improvements across Live Controller, color matching, and everyday workflows.

New Features

Web-based graphics

Pixotope 26.3 brings web-based graphics to the platform: broadcast graphics rendered using HTML and standard web technology.

This comes to Pixotope in two ways: full support for the OGraf standard, and the ability to render any HTML page.

OGraf

OGraf is a modern, open broadcast graphics format built on HTML rendering. Pixotope brings OGraf control to Live Controller, and rendering to VideoIO.

Pixotope VideoIO integrates OGraf, so broadcasters can use high-quality third party HTML based graphics directly within the Pixotope workflow. Once the OGraf designs are ready, you set up the templates in Live Controller and render them from Pixotope using VideoIO - one workflow, start to finish.

In Live Controller, import OGraf templates from a folder, a zip file, or pick one already sitting on the OGraf server. Once imported, OGraf templates use the same auto form as Engine and Motion Design templates: Live Controller reads the template's parameters and builds the control form for you.

On air, OGraf templates give you direct control over OGraf-specific functions: Continue, Delta step, and Goto step, alongside the usual take-in and take-out. They also come with a built-in HTML preview that needs no setup in Director. WebRTC preview still works exactly as it does for Engine and Motion Design templates, if that's the workflow you'd rather use.

HTML graphics

Beyond OGraf, Pixotope also renders any HTML page directly. This covers third-party web-based graphics platforms where creation and control both happen outside Pixotope, and only the rendering happens inside it. singular.live is one example of a platform where designs are built and driven externally, with Pixotope rendering the output.

Simply paste the URL of an HTML page into the Routing panel in Director, and it renders as a source, with no need for the content to follow the OGraf standard or for Pixotope to know anything about how it's controlled.

Pixotope Discovery

This release introduces Pixotope Discovery, a free way to try virtual production with Pixotope. Anyone curious about virtual production can sign up on the Pixotope website, create an account, and download Pixotope - no license assignment, no sales call, no cost.

Discovery runs the same platform trusted by the world's biggest broadcast studios, scoped for learning and evaluation: full Editor capabilities, VS and AR workflows, OGraf rendering, chroma keying, and the same end-to-end color pipeline used across the platform - plus full API access, Control Panel, Live Controller, and presets. It's file-based video and tracking only, capped at HD, and requires an online connection, but with no watermark on preview or output.

Discovery is the entry point to the Pixotope Platform - the same interface, scene format, and color science you'll use at every step above it. When you're ready for commercial productions and to go on air, that's where Pixotope Core and Pixotope Max come in. Read more about the platform and its editions at pixotope.com/news/pixotope-platform.

Pixotope Zone on Windows

Introducing Pixotope Zone on Windows: the first step in bringing every part of Pixotope onto one platform. Zone, our video-based tracking system for sports venues, now runs natively on Windows, integrated in the same workflow as the rest of Pixotope. Set it up, run it and monitor it from the same Director interface as everything else.

With this move, you get:

• A single, native platform for tracking and graphics - no separate OS or engine to bridge

• Fewer integration and failure points between systems

• A foundation for more Pixotope features, integrations, and real-time graphics innovation to build on

This is the first delivery of a longer effort to bring the whole Pixotope stack under one technical platform.

Video Wall Foundations

Pixotope 26.3 lays the full foundation for native video wall support, built directly into the standard Engine pipeline.

A wall is built from layouts, each made up of one or more 2D slots that hold content and are placed and scaled across the LED walls in the studio.

Slots support layering with instant reordering. Each slot can display clips, static images, textures, live media inputs, and real-time graphics from OGraf and Motion Design templates, with support for cut/fade/wipe transitions, flexible fit and crop options (Cover, Contain, Real Size, Stretch, Custom) with flipping, and timecode-synced playback that keeps content in sync across machines.

All of this is controlled from the new Video wall tab inside Director's LED Mapping panel, and can be controlled via our "Control video wall" control panel or directly using our API.

Because Video Wall runs on the same underlying system as our XR solution, the two aren't separate products - just different ways of using the same foundation. Studios can start with 2D video wall workflows and grow into full 3D, immersive XR when they're ready, while those already in XR can move between the two seamlessly.

What's still ahead: a dedicated, rundown-style workflow for controlling Video Wall layouts directly as Live Controller templates - the layer that turns this foundation into a streamlined, operator-facing production tool. That integration is planned for the next release, at which point Video Wall becomes a fully productised feature of Pixotope, integrated into Live Controller's control workflow.

Unreal Engine 5.8.3

Pixotope is moving to Unreal Engine 5.8.3, Epic's latest release, giving customers access to a strong set of new engine-level improvements.

Among many other features, 5.8 introduces production-ready MegaLights, which lets scenes hold hundreds of dynamic, shadow-casting lights while keeping performance steady, ideal for shows with complex or changing lighting setups. Lumen Lite adds a lighter global illumination mode for scenes where full-quality lighting would otherwise cost more than a live show can afford. The Motion Design toolset also gains performance and workflow improvements, including combined masking, plus more capable and reliable Text3D tools.

On top of that, Mesh Terrain (experimental) opens up complex 3D landscapes without the limits of traditional heightmaps, with support for overhangs and Nanite. Procedural Content Generation now lets artists directly edit generated vegetation and elements by hand while keeping the underlying logic intact. The experimental MCP Plugin brings workflow automation and external AI model connections into the engine, assisting with asset handling and level design. Live Link Hub, now production-ready, centralizes multi-camera monitoring and synchronized recording for virtual production. And a polished editor brings improved transform gizmos and reorganized project settings to everyday work.

Together, these updates give Pixotope productions more lighting headroom, faster iteration, and a stronger foundation for what comes next.

Improvements

Live Controller

Playlist sections

Organize a Live Controller playlist into sections. Group related instances together, nest sections up to three levels deep, and collapse or expand them to keep a long rundown readable under pressure.

Mark any section as triggerable, allowing you to take in or out every instance inside it - one action instead of several. Give a section a name, a color, and an optional recall ID, so it's fast to find and safe to fire live.

Form Builder

The new Form Builder in Live Controller lets you turn a template's auto-generated operator form into a custom layout of your own design. Click "Create custom form," and the auto form becomes a layout you can rearrange freely. Add widgets from a library, or pull in any of the template's own properties directly, so every element on the form stays connected to something real in the template, not a placeholder. Layout them using containers, add headings and swap one type of widget for a closely related one when it fits better.

Properties that already come with a fixed set of choices carry those choices with them. Add one to the form and its options come along automatically, so there's no retyping a list of values that already exist somewhere else.

Changes save automatically in the background as you work. If a design gets too far from what you wanted, one click reverts the whole form back to its original auto-generated state and lets you start again.

Angle-based color matching

LED walls shift in color and brightness depending on viewing angle, and a volume built from multiple walls can drift out of sync. A new gamma control gives operators an RGB slider to reshape the angle matching curve, useful when the standard correction needs to run darker at one brightness level and brighter at another, including color shifts around blue that the default curve couldn't fully resolve.

Presets now save and recall a full set of angle correction values per wall, so a working calibration can be reapplied instead of rebuilt each time. Copying settings between walls is also selective now; you choose which walls receive the copy instead of it going out to all of them.

Virtual Monitor

Virtual Monitor, placing content on a virtual screen within a scene, now supports clips and stills alongside live feeds. This is achieved through the underlying Media Input actor, which now allows switching between Live Input and Video or Image File playback, each with its own controls for selecting the live input or the media file path.

File playback supports MP4, MOV, and MKV containers with AVC, HEVC, HAP, and ProRes codecs, plus looping, play/pause, and seek control.

All properties and playback functions are automatically exposed to Control Panel, so widgets can be linked by drag and drop alone. The Input Text widget in Control panel also gains a file/path browser: pick a clip or image from a native file browser and its path is sent straight to the Engine, opening the file automatically.

Lens File Editor

Pixotope's Lens File Editor gets a meaningful update in 26.3, focused on flexibility and everyday usability. Calibration data no longer needs to sit on a perfect grid - non-gridded 2D data is now fully supported - so engineers can capture measurements at the points that make sense for the lens, rather than at points dictated by the tool.

Day-to-day usability improves alongside it: plots load faster, point editing is more direct and predictable, and several long-standing user-facing pain points in the editor have been addressed.

Asset Hub

This release brings speed, stability, and clarity improvements to Asset Hub. File transfers are faster across the board - both large numbers of small files and large individual files sync quicker than before. Background sync and backup mode run more reliably, with fewer stalls, and a hard reset option makes it easy to bring a machine cleanly back in sync.

Sync progress is also more transparent: push and pull now report more granular stages - analysis, block creation or merging, and data transfer - so it's clearer what's actually happening at any given point, instead of a single progress bar jumping between initiating, syncing, and finalizing.

Diagnostics

The Debug Info on Outputs feature has been expanded and now supports:

• Per-output configuration: configure debug info individually per output instead of per machine

• New info fields: XR mapping name, video format, color space, tracking status

• Custom text field: display your own custom string on the overlay

• Position & size control: reposition the overlay and double its size if needed

• Configure all of the above while previewing it live

Collecting a dump used to mean running the process on one machine at a time, then gathering the files yourself if a show spanned multiple machines. Pixotope Dump is now built directly into Pixotope Diagnostics, the service that already runs on every machine, and a single trigger collects data from all of them at once, with live progress as it works.

It also now pulls logs from every project in the currently open show, not just one, so nothing has to be tracked down separately.

Pixotope Gateway

Pixotope Gateway requests can now be protected with an optional passkey, managed from a new control panel in the Control panel library. Gateway URLs also accept multiple arguments when calling a Blueprint function, and most API calls in our documentation now come with a copyable Gateway URL example, so you can trigger them straight from a browser or any tool that sends HTTP requests.

Quality of life

As always, this release includes a set of smaller improvements driven by customer feedback:

• Pass any input through to an output: The list of output sources in the Routing panel now dynamically includes all available input sources

• File recording options: Set the pixel format and bitrate when recording to file

• Smarter expressions in Control panel: The Expression editor now supports Equal, Not equal, Less than, Less than or equal, Greater than and Greater than or equal. Equal and Not equal also work with strings

• Movable Preset drawer: Move the Preset drawer up or down when it covers something you need to see

• Notification center in its own tab: Open the Notification center as a separate browser panel to keep it visible alongside your work

• Tidier VideoIO Debug UI: The VideoIO Debug UI has a clearer structure and can now be closed using its close icon without stopping the videoIO service

Upgrading to Pixotope 26.3

Changelog

1. Log in to the user section of the → Pixotope Cloud 

2. Go to Downloads

Known bugs and limitations