I Was Mis-LED

We don’t shoot with LED screens. We access the Unreal Engine in a better way, virtual production beyond LED walls, and hold two U.S. patents on an important part of the filming process.

On our Unreal Engine virtual production studio, clients can shoot single camera OR multi-camera, with perfect camera moves and with talent IN the virtual sets, not just in front of them. Here is how our method compares with an LED volume stage. Independently moving cameras sharing the same wall space is what an LED wall cannot do; on our green screen stage, each camera gets its own render. Our composite happens after the camera, so the foreground can be delayed to meet the render and fast moves stay locked, while an LED wall has to be right at the shutter. And because separate background, foreground and matte feeds are recorded alongside the composite, the background stays recoverable after the shoot.

There are other advantages to our setup versus LED too. In fact, there are too many to mention here.

So I was surprised when a producer contacted me to shoot a special message from a well-known corporate client on a big LED screen. This producer knew that LED filming is kind of like when 3D TV’s were all the rage years ago. The idea of 3D TV’s was hot, and everybody thought they’d be taking over, but the disadvantages outweighed the advantages, so 3D TV’s fizzled out. LED is kind of like that, and this producer knew it. So why was he thinking of shooting on an LED stage?

The answer was that his client wanted the look of a giant TV screen behind their executive as the executive made his announcement. He wanted it to look like a giant curved screen was behind him; he wasn’t trying to make it look like he was in an actual location.

The good news is that if your production wants to look like the talent is standing in front of a big screen, we can make a virtual LED screen, and it looks identical to the real thing, but without the problems of LED filming mentioned earlier. It’s counter-intuitive that if you want the “in-front-of-a-giant-LED-screen” look, that we can create a virtual LED screen, and it will be better than a real LED screen.

But that’s exactly what we did for this client, and it looked like the biggest, baddest curved LED screen on the market, which we populated with the client’s cool moving graphics.

The shoot went flawlessly, and my client and his client loved it. And as an added bonus, our virtual LED screen saved the client tens of thousands of dollars versus filming on a real LED stage.

The virtual LED screen in motion, built in Unreal Engine and composited live in camera.