A system and method for virtual camera configuration and selection. For example, one embodiment of a system comprises: a decode subsystem comprising circuitry to concurrently decode a plurality of video streams captured by cameras at an event to generate decoded video streams from a perspective of corresponding virtual cameras (VCAMs); video evaluation logic to apply at least one video quality metric to determine a quality value for the decoded video streams or a subset thereof, and to rank the decoded video streams based, at least in part, on the quality values associated with the decoded video streams; preview logic to provide the decoded video streams or modified versions thereof to one or more computing devices accessible to one or more video production team members and to further provide the quality values and/or the rank generated by the video quality evaluation logic; stream selection hardware logic to select a subset of the plurality of decoded video streams based on input from the one or more video production team members; and transcoder hardware logic to transcode the subset of the plurality of decoded video streams for live transmission over a public or private network.