Production Guide
Las Vegas hosts more major conventions, trade shows, and industry events than any other city on the planet. CES, NAB Show, SEMA, CONEXPO, MJBizCon, and hundreds of other events bring hundreds of thousands of attendees to the city every year. For exhibitors, speakers, and event producers, the Las Vegas convention environment creates a specific set of video production needs — and a specific set of logistical challenges that production companies who don't work this market regularly don't know how to navigate.
This guide covers what exhibitors and event producers need to know about video production in the Las Vegas convention environment.
Exhibitors at Las Vegas conventions have several distinct video production needs that are often conflated or poorly planned for:
Booth content and looping video. The video playing on screens in your booth is often the first thing that draws attendees in from the aisle. Most exhibitors treat this as an afterthought and arrive with poorly compressed, incorrectly formatted content that looks bad on the booth displays. If you are spending tens of thousands of dollars on a convention presence, the video playing in your booth deserves production investment proportional to that spend.
On-site interview capture. Major conventions are one of the most efficient environments for capturing executive interviews, customer testimonials, and partner conversations on video. You have a captive audience of industry contacts in one place for three to five days. An ENG crew dedicated to your booth for a day or two can capture six months of interview content in a single convention. This content — properly edited — serves social media, sales enablement, and PR purposes well beyond the convention itself.
Convention floor B-roll. Coverage of your booth in action — demos, crowd activity, executive presentations, product interactions — is content that most exhibitors underinvest in. It documents the event for internal stakeholders, creates social content, and provides material for post-show recap videos and press releases.
Product demonstrations on camera. If your product or service has a demonstration component, a convention is the right environment to capture it on video with real customer reactions. This requires planning — the right camera position, proper audio in a noisy convention hall, and coordination with your demo staff.
Convention and trade show producers have different requirements from exhibitors. Their video production needs center on the event infrastructure itself:
General session and keynote coverage. Multi-camera coverage of main stage programming — keynotes, general sessions, awards presentations, and panel discussions — is the core deliverable for most event producers. This requires a properly sized camera configuration for the venue, a technical director doing live switching or ISO recording, and coordination with the venue AV team for program audio feed access.
Breakout session documentation. Major conventions run dozens of breakout sessions simultaneously. Capturing this content — even with single-camera ENG coverage — produces a content library that the event organization can distribute, monetize, or use for next year's marketing. The logistics require multiple crews running independently across multiple rooms on a coordinated schedule.
Event highlight and recap video. A post-event highlight reel is the deliverable that extends the life of the event beyond the days it ran. It is used for next year's promotion, sponsor reporting, and organizational communications. This requires dedicated coverage throughout the event with the recap in mind, not just a cut-down of whatever footage happens to exist.
Press and media coverage. Large conventions generate significant media interest. A dedicated ENG crew for press day coverage, media availability management, and EPK production serves the event's PR objectives and provides the production infrastructure that media outlets need to cover the event without sending their own full crews.
The major Las Vegas convention venues each have their own production logistics requirements. Here is what matters operationally:
Las Vegas Convention Center. The LVCC is one of the largest convention centers in the world, with the new West Hall adding over 1.4 million square feet of space. Load-in logistics are complex, and parking for production vehicles requires advance coordination. The LVCC's preferred vendor relationships mean that some production services — rigging, power, and AV — require coordination with or purchase through the house. Networking and internet services are provided by Smart City Networks. Budget for dedicated internet circuits; the shared convention floor network is not sufficient for streaming or large data transfers.
Venetian Expo and Congress Center. The Venetian's convention and meeting space is among the most production-friendly in Las Vegas. It is consistently ranked as one of the best-run convention venues in the country for its logistical infrastructure. Smart City Networks handles telecommunications here as well. The Venetian's physical layout — with the meeting rooms and expo hall relatively close to load-in access — simplifies multi-room coverage logistics significantly.
Mandalay Bay Convention Center. Mandalay Bay's convention space is managed by MGM Resorts, and production access goes through their event services team. Cox Business handles telecommunications on MGM properties. The venue has a large footprint spread across multiple connected halls, which requires additional coordination for multi-room productions.
Caesars Forum. Opened in 2020, Caesars Forum is designed around the requirements of large conventions and corporate events. The 300,000-square-foot space centers on two pillarless ballrooms and modern technical infrastructure. Production access and telecommunications are managed through Caesars Entertainment's event services.
Every major Las Vegas convention venue has some level of exclusive or preferred vendor arrangement for in-venue production services. This is one of the most common sources of confusion and unexpected cost for event producers bringing their own production teams.
The key distinction: exclusive arrangements typically apply to specific technical services — rigging, house audio, fixed house cameras, and some AV infrastructure. They typically do not prevent you from bringing your own production company for camera operation, lighting packages, recording, and post-production. But the specifics vary by venue and by event contract.
Confirm the exclusive vendor language in your venue contract before booking any production crew. A production company with experience at the specific venue can advise on what is and is not subject to exclusivity based on their own operational history there.
Mr. Camera has been producing at Las Vegas convention venues since before most of the current venues existed. Our crews have worked CES, NAB, SEMA, and hundreds of other conventions at every major venue in the market. We know the load-in procedures, the telecommunications providers, the venue contacts, and the operational requirements that make convention production run smoothly.
For exhibitors needing booth interview coverage or B-roll: we can deploy an ENG crew to your booth for a day rate that produces more usable content than most exhibitors get from their entire convention presence.
For event producers needing multi-camera session coverage, highlight reels, or press day production: we have the crews, equipment, and venue relationships to execute at the scale your event requires.
If you have a convention or trade show coming up in Las Vegas, get in touch with us here.
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