1. Save on locations and location scouting
In a virtual production environment, you can get (pretty much) any location you want. There is no need to send out (and pay) location scouts to find your dream location. You can simply download it in minutes for a relative small fee, out of an – ever growing amount – of professionell pre made scenes, or you can just dream it up, and have your 3D guy make it for you (for a bigger fee of course).
But once you have it, you can use it as much, and as often (like in an other project) as you like, and never ever pay for it again. You also never ever have to deal with permissions, stuff you (or your crew) wreck, insurance and whatnot.
2. Save on set design and set dressing
Just repainting the walls of an real world location, to fit your color concept (and maybe paint em back after the production) can be a royal pain in the ass. Also set dressing, props and other stuff that makes a scene shine, is expensive, often hard to find, to get to rent and transport.
In an virtual environment, you can just drop almost anything into place and change colors and stuff at your will within minutes, for little extra cost.
Need some 1930s cars in a flashback scene? Just download and plop them in – or a fancy neon sign for a club, a few pirate ships at a harbor – how about the Titanic? Anything? Imagine the money you would have to spend otherwise. In VP, it’s not a problem at all.
3. Save on lighting
Yeah, we all know, that those Arri 18Ks make really nice good rays when you shine a few of them from the outside into a room. But the price tag that is attached to rent them (and a generator van), the crew to handle them, plus the time to set them up is often cost prohibitive. In VP you just drop a few lights where ever you want them and call it a day.
Same goes for all other lights in your 3D environment. The only lights you may need, is some small lights for your actors.
4. Save on travel and accommodation.
Let’s say you have 3 scenes – one in New York, one in Paris, and one in front of the pyramids. Just imagine the amount of money you have to spend for travel/flights and accommodation, just to get your crew and actors there (not to mention the time it takes, and hassles like jetlag, permissions etc).
For a minimal fraction of that, you can shoot all 3 scenes within a day or two, without spending an extra penny for tickets and hotels – which brings my to my next point:
5. Independents from time of the day and weather.
This is huge – maybe the number one time/money saver of them all. We all know that weather is one of the biggest production risks of any film. If it is raining (or not raining enough), sunny (or not sunny enough), overcast or anything else you need/want, it’s ether getting more expensive by the minute, or you shoot under subpar conditions, that make you images less stellar than they could be. In a VP-Studio, you are the ruler of the weather. You can make it, whatever you want.
You can nail down that sun for days and weeks at the exact same spot, if you have to. You can make it instant golden hour, that lasts forever, or sudden night. Just think of how much time and money you can save that way, and how much more consistent your images will be.
6. Do the impossible
Do you really want to burn down half a forest, just because your screenplay calls for it – or would you rather ditch that scene? How about a huge space ship hangar at the size of 100 football fields, or a dystopian future city?
Even big $$$ Hollywood productions don’t do that shit anymore (they go VP instead), so why should you? The answer is: you shouldn’t, and you probably can’t afford it anyway. But you can in VP, only you imagination is the limit. Everything else is at your fingertips.
In a nut shell:
Though shooting in a virtual production environment has it’s limitations (and you better learn them), and it’s not a solution for everything, it’s a solution for many things, and it can raise your production value over the moon, without breaking the bank.
It probably can save you a ton of money instead, or can make impossible shots suddenly possible.
The cons
Like any technology, virtual production has its own set of problems and limitations.
Moirè on the LED Wall for example. Depending on, how close your camera is to the wall, there is a point where the pixels of the LEDs almost match the size of the pixels on the camera’s sensor, when seen through the lens – that’s when moirè is raising its ugly head. For now there is no better solution than slightly blurring the background.
Light quality. The big thing that get’s thrown around all the time, when it comes to LED caves is, that the LEDs cast a perfect and dynamic light on everything in the scene. While this is true (especially for reflections on shiny things) there is a downside. LEDs are RGB and pretty terrible at producing a natural continuous spectrum. They throw out very narrow bands and spikes, that can make look colors (and skin colors) look awful. It’s called metamerism, and for now, there is no solution for that.
The seam between the virtual reality and your practical floor. Your cave has – of course – some sort of floor. That floor may be covered with sand, leaves, grass or what have you, and it runs up to the edge of your monitor wall. To make the illusion work, that seam has to be covered, somehow camouflaged or dealt with in post. Also it has to be a perfect match (color/texture) to your 3D background, or it will stick out like a sore thumb.
Extra lights. Though the monitor wall partly wraps around the stage the light only comes from those directions. Usually you need extra lights to compliment the light coming from the LED wall. This must be done very carefully, cause those extra lights – when hitting the LEDs – are fogging up the black levels.
Latency. When you move the camera, that movement is tracked and fed to the Unreal Engine. Unreal than enders the matching environment – according to the tracking data – pretty much in real time. But there is a little bit of delay between a camera move and what you see on the LED wall. For The Mandalorian, ILM was fighting a latency of 8 frames. This needs to be taken in consideration and carefully managed.
Yeah Frank I get it, but renting such an fancy LED cave is still over my budget.
Yes, those are expensive to rent, but you don’t have to. There are other solutions – not as fancy and elegant as the “holy grail” LED volume of the Mandalorian, but still a substantial upgrade from home made green screen productions.
If you just want to give it a try, you can start with spending very little money, used HTC Vive equipment from Craigs List, a capture card, the free Unreal Engine and some green screen fabric.
Matt from Cinematography Database gives you the basics in the video below.
The setup I use is basically the same, but with some improvements that make a world of a difference, and also overcome some of the problems you can encounter with a real LED wall.
When it comes to virtual production, I work with the guys at heimspielstudios, and with meilenstein/DFStudios, if I need a huge studio, almost like an hangar, that I can drive in with a big truck.
Here we feed the signal from up to 3 Blackmagic Studio cameras, tracked down to sub millimeter precision with a tracker system from Antilatency into Aximmetry, which also does the keying (amazing real time keyer by the way) also the composing of the real world footage and the 3D scenery, coming from Unreal. It’s really amazing how well it all works together, and everything in real time. All that hat needs some beefy workstations of course.
Here is a little Test we done lately. Remember what I said about burning down a forest? 😉
Frank Glencairn 
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