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Exploring Virtual Production

This page will highlight virtual porduction techniques, mainly harnessing L.E.D volumes as an alternative to green screeen technologies.

V.P

Since, I intend to harness virtual production as a means to set my short film in a cyberpunk style world, I better begin experimenting with it!

I've already got some basic experience, a good year back i set up Unreal Engine's Vcam. This allows an apple device to be used as a means to control a camera actor in real-time, thanks to Apple's ARkit.

This is intended to be used as a budget way to capture handheld camera movements within the engine, aswell as a virtual scene scouting device. It provides a really cool demo of the basic principles of how camera tracking works in higher end systems, and can be used as a camera tracker aswell!.

The next step from this is to use a dedicated camera tracking device, of which there are many available [vive trackers,optitrack, retracker, xiess cincraft, and many more at all pricepoints] which is used to track a real world camera in relation to an L.E.D volume.

So, what is a L.E.D volume? Well, it's basically a giant television, a bit more complicated, but fundamentally the same thing. These massive screens allow an actor or object to be placed into a virtual world in real-time, rather than after the fact, like a greeen-screen. This allows for much better visualisation of how the final shot will look.

Just about any camera can be used to do this, however the presence of a few key technologies makes this workflow alot more usable, such as timecode, genlock and global shutter systems.

For my mock-up trailer, I'm hoping to use my Universities' studio, which has receently beeen fitted with a big enough screen, aswell as a camera tracker, and blackmagic camera with all of these key features. However, if it's not available to use anytime soon, I can make do with my Blackmagic production camera 4k [which atleast has a global shutter] a mobile phone and a large T.V.

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