THE EXCHANGE
THE EXCHANGE
XR is a term being bandied about a lot at the moment, but what exactly is it and what might its potential be in the world of filmmaking? A new white paper from Brainstorm – a company specialising in real-time 3D graphics and virtual set solutions for broadcast and feature films – explores exactly that. Nicola Foley digs into the findings with the team
FIRSTLY, XR IS A BROAD AND SOMETIMES MISUNDERSTOOD TERM. HOW WOULD YOU DEFINE ITS ROLE SPECIFICALLY IN THE CONTEXT OF FILM AND TV PRODUCTION? Well, XR stands for extended reality, meaning the combination of real and virtual environments, actors or objects that merge to produce virtual content, so it’s as broad as it could be. As a form of virtual reality, it combines synthetic images (objects, backgrounds, graphics with data, etc) with real actors. However, for broadcast and film content creation, XR has been understood as the combination of virtual environments from an LED wall, and sometimes LED floors, with real characters on a stage and sometimes other graphic elements. This concept has lately evolved into the term virtual production, which is more understandable and includes chroma studio shooting; no longer just large LEDs.
WHAT MOTIVATED BRAINSTORM TO CREATE THIS WHITE PAPER ON XR? WERE THERE PARTICULAR MISCONCEPTIONS OR CHALLENGES IN THE INDUSTRY THAT YOU WANTED TO ADDRESS? Brainstorm has worked in virtual set and real-time 3D graphics creation for decades, and has pioneered different technologies, including real-time film previs back in the early 2000s with the movies I, Robot , AI Artificial Intelligence and many others. So this technology isn’t new for us, but we’ve recently seen how real-time, hyperrealistic virtual content creation has become more common. With so many new people coming to use this technology, there comes misunderstanding and misinformation around the technology, its possibilities and results. Coupled with the fact that some sectors in the market believed real-time VP, or XR, was only possible using large LED volumes, this made
us compile some information that ended up as a white paper. It details concepts, workflows, advantages and disadvantages of VP in general. In fact, as this technology has evolved and the industry is adopting it, we realised this ‘Understanding XR’ paper required updates, which is why we’re releasing a second edition now called ‘Understanding Virtual Production’. HAVING WITNESSED THE EVOLUTION OF XR, WHAT HAVE BEEN SOME OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT MILESTONES IN ITS ADOPTION WITHIN THE FILM INDUSTRY? creating a hit and putting this technology on the map. However, despite the initial hit, and the buzz in the industry that led some to believe that chroma was dead, once the hype cooled down the industry We must praise The Mandalorian and Industrial Light & Magic for
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