PRODUCTION/POST


VIRTUAL PRODUCTION 2.0


Virtual production, particularly in- camera VFX, has led to as many challenges as ‘wow’ moments. But with dedicated technology now on the market, are we on the cusp of ‘Virtual Production 2.0’? Michael Burns reports


THE NEXT STAGE: VIRTUAL PRODUCTION 2.0


ith high-speed components and true-to- content colour representation,


when it comes to LED displays, we’ve definitely reached virtual production 2.0,” says Ian Jones, Project Director, Film and TV at Anna Valley. “We are about to start experimenting with increasing the frame rate of the LED surfaces and shooting with high-speed cameras, up to 1600fps.” Last year Anna Valley


purchased almost £2m worth of Roe Black Pearl BP2 V2 ‘film- centric LED panels’ equating to a total of 224 sqm of same- batch LED panels. “The BP2V2 is an updated version of the Black Pearl BP2 [used on The Mandalorian] with features that have been adapted to provide the same in-camera performance but with a quicker and easier camera set-up and handling,” says Jones. “On the server and playback side, we’ve recently diversified our capabilities by adding Unreal servers to our existing inventory of disguise servers. When Unreal


68 televisual.com Summer 2023


servers are used in conjunction with the Pixera licenses that we’ve also just purchased it means we can take care of both rendering and plate playback from either solution rather than requiring dedicated hardware for each function – which helps cut down on the costs involved in virtual production.” Lux Machina Consulting,


now part of NEP Virtual Studios, has been involved in big virtual production projects, such as the first season of The Mandalorian and House of the Dragon, but MD David Gray, has observed the initial trend of film studios erecting massive LED volumes being surpassed by a greater number of smaller builds to solve individual problems. “Those big solutions are still


totally valid for some productions, if you’re doing massive world- building for example, but we’re seeing a lot more sequence-based work, such as people building a skyscraper set with a window or having ten minutes of driving sequences in a film,” says Gray. There’s going to be a lot more of those ‘utility virtual productions’


and we’re working with production designers or DoPs to make the right tool for them.” According to its Head of


Product Innovation Richard Wormwell, dock10 is catering to a complete spread of needs “from the basic small-set YouTuber through larger-scale news and entertainment to huge virtual sets that can handle large casts and lots of movement”. To achieve this, dock 10 has


installed virtual technology in all ten of its television studios. “This enables us to apply virtual elements to any TV show of any size or scale,” says Wormwell. “A good example of this is the recent episode of BBC2’s Inside Number 9 where the story took place inside a quiz show television set. It looks amazing with all the flashing lights, big screens and general glitz of a primetime TV quiz, but the entire set was virtual apart from three cardboard tubes – and even these were hidden.”


VIRTUAL SPACE Sony recently opened a


dedicated test and learning space for VP in its Digital Media


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