Preserve The True Look of Your Media with ‘Keep Media Colors’!

Zero Density’s Reality platform has long been a leader in virtual studio production with its advanced keying, rendering and compositing pipeline. Reality 5 uses Unreal Engine 5 with a streamlined architecture, delivering extraordinary quality while maintaining reliability, efficiency, and seamless integration. Broadcasters like The Weather Channel, Warner Bros. Discovery, CBS and Univision rely on the platform daily to deliver immersive content with high-fidelity graphics.

In this Imagine Tech segment, we look at the Keep Media Colors feature.

When it comes to rendering quality, game engines handle real-time 3D graphics very well. However, the moment you bring in external media, whether it’s a video clip or a static image, the default rendering pipeline can shift the colors and images looks blurry.

To solve this, we built Keep Media Colors inside Reality 5. It is a custom material function that preserves the true look of your media by bypassing unwanted tone mapping, stabilizing exposure and keeping the original RGB values intact.

Temporal AA can make images appear softer and introduce spatial and temporal smudging, while Unreal Engine’s default filmic tone mapper can cause color shifts. When media is used inside a 3D environment. Unreal Engine’s default pipeline clips whites, crushes blacks, and increases contrast and saturation, changing the original look of the image. The final result can look noticeably different from the source.

In practice Keep Media Colors minimizes the artefacts you normally see with media textures in Unreal, including temporal smudging. With a moving camera, the difference would become more clear.

The default side loses stability, while Keep Media Colors keeps the image clean, stable and full of detail. It also preserves details that are usually lost in wider shots.

As the screen gets smaller, video textures without mipmaps can introduce aliasing, which keeps media color’s material function reduced through super sampling.

Keep Media Color handles depth of field, focus pulls and motion blur smoothly. While existing solutions like Media IO Holdout composite can not be used with depth of field and motion blur. An example material is already included in our example content virtual set, and because Keep Media Colors is part of Reality’s built-in engine content, it is always ready to use, no extra setup, no plugins and no guesswork. Just drop the function into your material workflow.

Reality handles the rest. Whether it’s live inputs, video or still graphics, your content stays clean, stable and true to the original, exactly what professional broadcast demands.

In short, Keep Media Colors directly addresses the common problem of media degradation in real-time engines. By bypassing filmic tonemapping and stabilizing exposure and temporal behavior, it ensures that videos and images remain consistent, sharp, and color-accurate, even during camera movement, focus pulls, and wide shots. The result is predictable, broadcast-safe media rendering without workarounds or manual tuning.

Zero Density develops virtual production and broadcast graphics solutions trusted by the world’s leading broadcasters — including ABC, CBS, Charter Communications, FOX, The Weather Channel and Univision. Its flagship platform, Reality 5, powers real-time virtual studios, augmented and extended reality productions, and on-air graphics. Complemented by the Traxis tracking platform and EVO engine hardware series, Zero Density’s end-to-end ecosystem gives production teams the tools to realize their most ambitious creative visions in real time, without compromise.