VIRTUAL PROJECTION Q&A
DEFINITION: WHY DID CHRISTIE CREATE ITS
the whole take has to be perfect. It was so expensive to maintain the LEDs. The electrical costs were enormous just to keep them in standby. Because if you turn them off, you have to recalibrate – and that’s laborious, so people are incentivised to keep them rolling. In order to get final pixel on-set, it’s stressful and time-consuming. If somebody wants to change their mind, that will mean changing your virtual environment in order to match the flow of the scene. And in the motion picture business, time is money. Christie Virtual Projection solves all of these problems by essentially allowing cameras to have the understanding that they’re in a green-screen environment, while the crew and the talent are in an immersive environment. You’re giving the crew and talent essentially what LED walls were giving people, which is an immersive experience. With that, you’re not limited by having to capture what the eye can see. You now have the ability to, as I like to say, ‘have your cake and eat it too’.
VIRTUAL PROJECTION SOLUTION? WHAT PROBLEMS OR PAIN POINTS DOES IT ADDRESS? CHRIS BARNETT: Virtual production has been around for a while. It started with The Mandalorian – that was the breakout case study, with these huge LED walls, and it was this immersive experience. What they didn’t tell everyone was that the method was actually very difficult to achieve. Inevitably, time bore truths, and the truth of the matter is that trying to get in- camera VFX, or final pixel, accomplished on-set is challenging. Your assets have to be perfect, the wall has to be perfect,
YOU HAVE AN in-camera capture AND, AT THE SAME TIME, THIS chroma capture – IT GIVES TWO OUTPUTS” image-based relighting – these types of workflow come at a button click now. It’s all hyper-efficient. It’s now possible to take your footage and then, in post, very quickly and very inexpensively change how it’s perceived. You can even change the frame rate and shutter angle so that your motion blur will look exactly the way you want it to. When you have all that power in post, the idea of doing it all in pre-production just seems silly. DEF: TALK ME THROUGH VIRTUAL PROJECTION. HOW DOES IT WORK? CB: It’s a high-frame-rate VP system with a projector (and a green screen) instead of an LED wall. What’s seen in the room is only for the talent and crew, but you’re actually
DEF: WHY DO YOU BELIEVE GREEN SCREENS ARE STILL
THE SUPERIOR CHOICE?
CB: Using a green screen environment is so much more
flexible. You can have multiple cameras. You can composite things and do AR. There aren’t all these pain points. Now, doing VFX in post is more efficient than trying to do in-camera VFX because you can put footage through a machine-learning or AI-based process and make it automatic. The hard parts of compositing – like removing the green or
LAYERED IMAGES Christie Virtual Projection involves a high-frame-rate VP system, projector and green screen (left); magenta lighting counteracts green from the green screen (above)
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DEFINITIONMAGS
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