Product Commercial with Unreal Engine, iPhone and TV - Virtual Production

[Music] so a couple of weeks ago I decided to try and learn how to do virtual production in Unreal Engine I thought it could be useful for things I'm doing I have a TV that could conceivably be used for it because it's big enough so I went around the internet and I gathered a bunch of information on how to do it it was all scattered across multiple places and I thought I'm going to put it all in one place if nothing else then for my own reference right so I made a quick tutorial I put it on this channel now there's 1,300 people here and I have no idea how that happened in all seriousness though super grateful to all you guys for being here you have no idea how much this means but in the meantime I thought I should play more with unreal and see if I can do something Beyond just a one shot of a floaty man in front of window so I decided to try to do a product commercial Style video you know you you've seen those types of videos before it's like the product reveal announcement type of thing with dark environment and flashy lights and spinny shots and all of the things that you would normally do on like a black backdrop right so I thought what if instead of the black backdrop I put the unreal backdrop behind it and see how that goes it should give me The Parallax it should you know make it a little more neat than just the black background right so I went to the unreal store and I grabbed this asset here cyberpunk City pack which has a ton of stuff in it it has the streets it has a laundromat it has a little car repair shop which was the set that I used for this and the engine setup itself was basically the same as last time uh except there's there's a thing that I didn't do last time cuz I kind of didn't need to with the environment that I used but I noticed at this time which is to go into the show menu and then go down to Sprites and then hide them all Sprites are in unreal what Unity calls gizmos which is basically these like utility indicators of what things are that are on screen and you don't want them in your shop right you just want the clean environment you don't want the unreal UI in the shot the other thing that I noticed this time that wasn't the issue last time was that if your iPhone has a VPN enabled then your unreal will not not find the live link subject right so your phone will connect you will see the viewport but the unreal will not show the subject source so make sure that there is no VPN active on your iPhone that's the unreal setup for the full thing just watch the previous video apparently it's very good now the product was this thing it's the hacksmith mini saber which is their fancy lightsaber lighter thing it's look it's color changing you can you can sort of see it right I think it's pretty cool and it's reflective which is a very important thing the things that benefit most from virtual production are things that are either reflective and they have the light wrap around them and bounce on the surface or things that are refractive like say a water bottle that have the light pass through them because that makes the immersion work so hacksmith minis saber the filming setup was hilarious it's the three flooring panels from my studio setup video which you should check it out it's pretty good I put them on top of my ironing board on top of my coffee table in front of the TV high-end film making perfect I also use this thing this is the Ikea spinny boy if you're doing any kind of product videos you should have a lazy Susan these things are amazing and then lightingwise I had my key light off to the side same as last time Twisted slightly away from the TV to prevent Reflections I had an aperture MC on top of the TV to mimic the overhead Lights of the warehouse and then I played with various lights just by having them off to the side or moving them over the box to create this this light streak effect uh you know things you would typically do for these types of product videos so I got all the shots that you would expect in a video like this you know your forward push-ins your gimbal spins right all of those I threw it in resolve I toss on some basic color grade I couldn't quite find the music that I was that I sort of had in my head because the YouTuber licensing services are not particularly rich in mid-tempo Monster cat is the only one that has it and nothing was quite fitting as well as I hoped so I fired up logic I put together a quick midtempo theme thankfully serviceable midtempo is not that difficult to make especially for the needs of a YouTube video right this one was a very simple a minor mostly standard plug it you know what this is not a music production tutorial uh if you want a music production tutorial put it in the comments I'll make one but this is getting a little bit off track so one of the main things that I've learned trying to do this which was also by far the number one comment was Reflections right the TV by its Nature has a reflective surface which means that the lights you put next to it are going to be all over it uh not to mention the subject itself right if you're way too close to the TV you can see it but it's not as big of an issue with the subject you don't always have to be super close to it the lights however are a real problem there's a couple options here some people have suggested using a polarizer which you could but your mileage may vary for example with my TV if I try to use a polarizer this happens not particularly helpful for a virtual production right the best solution is of course to use a projector it is also the most expensive so one thing that another person common suggested was to use a green screen there's multiple ways to do this I've seen people do it real time I've seen people do a recorded motion track and then they have unreal just export the scene and then they use after effects to composite it which works but my whole thing with with the original video was that I specifically didn't want to use a green screen I want it to all be done in camera I want it to be quick I want to frame it shoot it color grade it deliver it don't want to do any compositing right so if you're down with the green screen I think that is the best way to remove Reflections on a budget if you have a budget go with a projector otherwise you know Point your lights away from the TV as much as you can try to film it with clever angle so that the reflections aren't in the shot that's the kind of stuff I've done for this one and I didn't see any Reflections that are interfering with what I'm trying to do the other issue that I personally encountered is that everything is a little too bright the TV is a light emitting surface right even the darker parts of the scene in your environment are going to be somewhat bright which means that the lights you use should probably be better than my 60D right I love my 60D I primarily have it because it's it's compact I need to travel with it and it basically fits in a pocket it's a great light probably not the best for working with an emissive background if you have something like a 200d or a 300 100 C or the expensive ones it's probably going to work better but 60D is definitely a problem just does not have enough light to work with the TV being used as a background one thing that could possibly remedy it I think is doing some postprocessing in unreal and color correcting it a little bit I have not done that though I just loaded up the demo scene I did not do any setup at all Beyond just loading in the scene and then configuring the camera if you spend some time doing some post-processing you can make your background look way better in the shot given the lighting you have and the camera you're using just yeah more effort is the answer I suppose the other issue that is sort of related to the last one is everything coming from the TV looks a little bit too blue if there's any gray surface it's probably going to be blue and if I wi balance my camera to that then the subject looks borderline unusable this one I feel is definitely fixable with post-processing though but it's something to keep in mind but by far the most important thing that I've learned about this whole thing is that I should not be using a 2-year-old laptop to run the whole thing because normally even when it is connected to power the scene of reasonable complexity like this cyberpunk city set runs fine for 10 minutes like it will render out at 24 frames per second all good but then at some point unreal does whatever it does and then this happens right the scene becomes essentially unusable I have to close unreal I have to restart it I have to probably let the laptop cool down because the fans are in takeoff position at that point it's just there's one thing that I can tell you as a world-renowned apple show is that you should use a desktop PC with a proper GPU if you want to do unreal virtual production the other thing that is sort of related to that is avoid slow motion unless you have a really high refresh TV or a projector because if you're shooting at 120 and your TV is refreshing at 60 this is what you get it seems obvious looking at the footage but I when I was filming it I was like oh let me do this cool slow motion spinny shot it's going to be amazing so yeah don't film everything at 24 or have a high refresh TV or do the green screen you know if you do the green screen then you have unreal render it at whatever FPS and you should be fine but those are the the takeaways so far from my unreal Journey next I want to try doing a proper display output seeing how that works I might actually end up having to get a dedicated PC because apparently you need a separate graphics card for that uh I haven't figured it out yet this this is not an Unreal Engine Channel guys let me let just make that clear all right unreal is a film making tool that I thought would be useful for me to learn and so I did but I'm by no means an unreal expert right this is this is a general purpose film making channel right I'm not freaking Punisher right he makes good stuff though you should check him out but this is you know stuff that I've learned so far I'm continuing to learn this hopefully you're learning it with me as well or maybe you already know some of this stuff and you can tell me in the comments how to do some of these things and how to be better about this because while this is cool so far like that intro clip is not something that I would personally sent to a client right so there's there's definitely room for improvement but it's just this the technology on its own is just so so freaking cool I'll leave you with one last tip which applies to the TV more so than it would to a projector or a green screen but it tends to work better with longer lenses assuming you're not dropping frames right with a wide view there's not really that much Parallax going on but if you go like 40 mil 50 mil or even tighter then you can't really tell what's happening behind you right but there's definitely some sort of motion happening like it looks like you're inside of a space much more than it does with like a 35 mil especially if you adjust the focus distance in unreal and you have the engine blow the background a little bit because you don't actually have that depth when you're shooting cuz the TV is like it's right there it's like a meter away right so you get as much bouquet as would at that distance but the actual scene could be much deeper so adjusting Focus inside of unreal really helps to sell it that's it for this video guys I will see you in the next one it's probably not going to be about unreal there's other things I want to talk about there's more stuff that I want to learn about unreal before I can talk about it with confidence but there's a lot more cool stuff coming to this channel I can't talk about some of it just yet but I promise you guys will not be disappointed so stay tuned subscribe thank you for watching and remember 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Channel: Max Rovensky

Views: 4,501

Keywords: unreal engine, virtual production, iPhone, live link, vcam, livelink, live link vcam, unreal virtual production, game engine, filmmaking, the mandalorian, mandalorian, vfx, icvfx, unreal engine virtual production, projector, green screen, game engine filmmaking, unreal filmmaking, unreal engine vfx, unreal environment, unreal engine tutorial, tutorial, after effects, htc vive, htc mars, vive mars, unreal engine filmmaking, unreal vfx, hacksmith, lightsaber, mini saber, minisaber

Id: 5DdVo_kjBsU

Length: 13min 7sec (787 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 16 2024