Drew Turney, September 19, 2024, Autodesk
- For the media and entertainment industry, data and hardware paradigms have been advancing for the last few years and productions are finding they add up to more than the sum of their parts.
- Enter virtual production—a process that uses game engines, sound stages, and LED screens in place of traditional sets or locations.
- This process saves time and production costs, enables remote collaboration, and allows earlier access to marketing assets like trailers for highly anticipated content.
- As costs decrease, applications of virtual production are also popping up in fields like architecture, construction, health care, and sales for virtual tours, realistic and safe training, and other uses.
There’s a whole new way to make media and entertainment (M&E) content using game engines, sound stages, LED screens, and digital data. Welcome to the age of virtual production.
Avatar (2009) was the most visible early example, then virtual production practices slowly became more common until the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic made it essential. Today, productions can give actors costumes and props and then do everything else digitally, with environments and backgrounds built within software and broadcast on giant LCD screens in enclosed, weatherproof performance spaces.
This represents the confluence of several established tools and techniques—and artists and studios are getting on board as costs come down and the results keep improving.
A long time coming
Virtual production can be used in everything from previsualization, where a sequence is animated in a low resolution to see if it works, right up to final render, where the high-definition backdrop is projected for in-camera capture.
Many elements of virtual production were established long before COVID-19, but restrictions around travel during the height of the pandemic gave the process its Hollywood moment, as the advances in technology were in perfect sync with the new normal of social distancing.
For example, when shooting Marvel’s Hawkeye, stars Jeremy Renner, Hailee Steinfeld, and Vera Farmiga acted out their parts remotely on sound stages, with software capturing their performances and importing the data into a single virtual scene.
It wasn’t ideal, but it was an effective proof of concept. “You’re definitely seeing a lot of remote collaboration,” says Chris Bannister, executive producer of virtual production at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM).
SOURCE:
Autodesk: https://www.autodesk.com/design-make/articles/virtual-production
