We CHANGED Virtual Production In Front Of HOLLYWOOD

[Music] we have some Cutting Edge virtual production to do and I suggest you get cozy because we're traveling to Nab in Las Vegas to launch a brand new feature of lightcraft Jet Set we're about to cause some disruption here and get some strong reactions from the 60,000 filmmakers that are expected to be there before we get started let me catch you up about lcraft Jet Set the sponsors of this video their app allows you to do full professional virtual production in an iPhone I've been covering them a lot on the channel recently because their app is truly mind-blowing and there are tons of features to actually cover I've spent the last week putting together our NAB demo which is going to be a driving scene we're going to have people coming to our booth at NAB and they'll see someone sat in front of a green screen but on the live render preview that person will be sat in a CG car which is traveling down the road what's been cool is working with the lightcraft team over time zones while they invent their new feature which is going to be genlock software genlock so when we preview our composite in Unreal Engine the virtual and real elements are perfectly locked together but it's not quite there yet we're still in the middle of testing it all and we have 2 days before I travel to Vegas I've got my fingers crossed this is just a nice smooth ride okay I have to catch my train I'll see you when I get to London bye next step on the journey is King's cross and obviously I'm not Josh I'm Dan I'm the cameraman heading over to meet Josh off the train there he is oh no another ner and there's Josh just getting up the train you're ready for round two let's go and do this thing why on Earth did you agree to do this again I got no idea more than halfway there so I'd got genlock working before I left the studio and the lightcraft team liked my car demo but they did think the driving was a little safe so this is me on the flight to Vegas adding loads more cars to the scene so I can send my hero card down into oncoming traffic perfectly unsafe and before I knew it we were in Vegas traveling to na fac set of day there are so many really bigname companies here this is so much bigger than BSC I'm here with Bill Warner and Elliot Mack co-founders of lightcraft jets this is actually the first time here in Vegas that we have met in the flesh so it's really really good to meet you can you tell us a little bit about yourselves I'm Elliot Mac started off in robotics I originally designed the iot Roomba a love of Motion Pictures and understanding how difficult they were to do and wanting to make that better that led to lcraft I'm Bill Warner I'm a founder of avid technology and Wildfire Communications with Avid I loved making videos and I just couldn't live with how hard linear editing was I finally said I can't wait and I started a it I rented my first little 8T by 8T cubicle from Bill way back in 2004 2004 yeah 20 years ago what is the main esos the purpose of this thing making it possible to create help make a filmmaker be able to make something without just getting completely torn apart by the Myriad of details that otherwise come up reach up and and you know drag you down what moment was it that made you realize oh the phone the iPhone that's the way forward how did that come about i' bought an an iPhone 11 Pro was actually now this one right and fired it up and realized wait a second that that's that's actually I mean is it as good as our dedicated custom machine you know Machine Vision overhead markers not quite as good but it's real close but it was is that this is working I've finished recording all of the dangerous traffic in my scene and I'm about to record the main car so there's lots for me to swerve and Dodge trust your Xbox controller press play Jos stop playing games get I'm busy turn turn turn turn turn turn turn boom a I can't even play my own map we can tell you don't have a driving license he's right in front of me is everything we're going to be using for our camera rig for our demo starting with the zcam body it's a really really nice little camera and we're using the iron glass 28 mm lens same lens they used on Dune part two so I'm going to be really careful with that on top of this camera is going to be the star of the show which is of course the app that's going to be Runing on the iPhone lcraft Jet Set that will be mounted as close to the front of this lens as possible to help our calibration because we're going to be using jet Z cine which has a lot of the really nice Pro features in order for genlock to work we're going to be using the second most important piece which is the axum Simo Pro this will get the video signal from the camera and pipe it into the iPhone right into the Jet Set app and at that point it's going to embed time code in both the tracking data and the video data then send those over to Unreal the time code is time of day time code from the iPhone but if you didn't want to use that for any reason you could use a tentacle syn we have one with us just in case but it's not essential you can get Chen loock just with the jetset app so you don't don't really need any really really expensive gear to do this we just need the app and your camera here we go day one and our demos start about 10 minutes from now so that's very exciting we have had a spanner in the works though my driving scene isn't ready to demo yet I don't know why it was working back in the studio something's going on in that project and I need to solve it but we can't use it right now that's when things took a left turn though wasn't the original plan people were loving an x-ing demo that we had running on an fx3 oh my God because the fx3 is so light people were just passing that camera back and forth between them sitting in front of the green screen and pretending to be an X-Wing Fighter they were doing wide shots close-ups and pretending it was an X-Wing Bonnet Mount what's incredible is seeing how creative people can get when the technology just gets out of the way then the Heavy Hitters showed up that's the 24 mil of this camera wow having Shane hbert in the booths with us was incredible I mean the these are people who you've seen online for years you've followed their work and there they are standing in front of you and you get to talk to them about cool filmmaking Tech I love it then we blew his mind we showed him a scene by Alex hanaman an amazing compositor his scene is set in a factory actually existed all right let's then we revealed to Shane that it was in fact all filmed on a green screen in a barn in Canada yes holy and day two was no different we had some incredible people coming through the booth wait a second is not greaten what I just don't want is for people to get to that stage of writing something they really care about and then the mental block comes down and goes I'll never be able to do that four years ago I started using unre engine and that that's gone now cuz I can just say well I'll just make it it might limit me to shooting on green for a lot of stuff but I'd rather have the thing made than than it rattling my head forever thank you very much great meeting you we've met so many people we just met the dop of Jurassic Park and Mandalorian season 3 but I mean that guy has done a lot it's not showing any signs of letting up we're just doing the aan demo right now which everyone loves obviously yeah back to it we were doing demo after demo getting incredible reactions she's only $80 M this incredible they're going to try to shut you guys down but the truth is the only thing people were seeing on the phone and the TVs around them was the composite created in the app itself it wasn't connected to Unreal Engine and it was a far cry from the genlock demo that I was hoping to Showcase here to leave things the way they were I would be cheating myself luckily I have a hard time letting go of things I had to get my car scene working I'm staying up a a while I think I'm going to try and crack the performance of this street scene because it's a night scene I could turn this into a day scene and what that might do for performance is it means I can turn off all of the street lights the point lights in this scene and there are a lot I think if I just take those out of the equation this is going to run a lot smoother yeah I'm just going to keep cracking through this so it's going to be stripped back quite considerably it's the morning of day three and we are about to get my driving scene working and people are just starting to come in which means we have a bit of a Race Against Time on our hands we are that close here we [Music] go look straight ahead pulling out of the driveway there no not backwards you [Music] nut so I'm finally getting my gen locked car sequence working it's uh been a bit of a bumpy ride getting here it's really really nice to see it working completely in sync tracking and video I'm so happy the work that we we put into this seems to be paying off in cinematic work you want to be able to move the camera you need to be able to track where the camera is going to put together a virtual image and a liveaction image it's been the same problem the whole whole time but you want free form you want to be able to pick up a camera and run around handeld and it just didn't didn't exist so we started building it coming from the point of like I want to make something beautiful and want to make something great as you go toward it what are the things getting in your way and the things that the roadblocks are the things that we work on to solve you're looking at uh 2/3 of the company right now right Greg cockro is in his farmhouse in Michigan and he's writing all the code we've taken you know virtual production from $95,000 to free and it's better the free version is better Jet Set what is next in the pipeline can you give us any information on what you're planning cuz it's got a lot of features but you know what what else are you doing Greg is doing refinement tracking right now so we tracking yep automated automated sub pixel postproduction tracking and I talked to him this morning said it's going really well it's going really well oh yeah all right there we go and I I'll tell you one other thing which is sort of a dream of ours it's it's going to take time but I really think we can do it in the long run we can build the technology that helps people make the movies and also sell the movies show the movies and and interact with their audience we are now coming to the end of NAB how's it felt we've had luminary after luminary come through and the reaction has been past anything I could have ever hoped and you're always curious whether these things that you put into something transmit and I think at the show what I saw is is people heard it that was a tough 3 days but we managed it I said we'd cause some disruption and we definitely got some strong reactions from people the amount of people who came to the booth and left shaken by what they'd seen was was really high and I know why and it's because we're putting virtual production in the pockets of basically anyone with an iPhone and allowing people to tell the stories that they never would have been able to otherwise thank you

Channel: Joshua M Kerr

Views: 21,178

Keywords: virtual production, iphone, unreal engine, unreal engine 5, unreal engine filmmaking, real time tech, unreal engine virtual production, green screen, green screen virtual production, iphone virtual production, easy virtual production, accsoon seemo, accsoon cineview se, filmmaking, filmmaker, 3d camera tracking, real time camera tracking, lightcraft jetset, jetset app, nab 2024, nab show, unreal engine vfx, virtual production setup

Id: OfdvjpgQlps

Length: 11min 16sec (676 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 30 2024