Testing A MASSIVE LED Wall - Virtual Production

we've been invited to test out the LED wall at Night Sky Studios and I'm bringing with me the most important thing which is an Unreal Engine scene I've been spending the last week putting together we're getting a bit of a frame rate drop it's not gonna work it's so amazing the size of these screens I'm a little nervous because I'm about to give them over my USB stick with the scene on it hopefully we'll actually get to the point where we can shoot something so stick around to the end of the video to see what we actually managed to put together so this is their largest screen that we're going to be using now what's most interesting in some cases LED walls will also have an LED ceiling so that you can have accurate Reflections coming overhead that's obviously really important when you do things like driving shots so that the car has all of the reflections so for this one they've got this large soft box with also arri Sky panels now I do have some overcast Lighting in my scene but also it means you can bring in some really strong Unreal Engine Dynamic lighting from the sky panels something linked to the engine bringing in Virtual lighting to knit the elements together I'm really excited to try that out we're going to be shooting on the fx9 which is amazing and that's being put together by Ben around the back of the screen right now camera wise you've got the fx9 here so what are you currently then doing to this camera the general thing that is happening is the tracker for the VP that is him so it's basically an infrared camera which on the roof there's a map of retroflective markers that we essentially build then that's what's tracking it what system is that is that Moses and the only other addition are these encoders the encoders are essentially telling Moses what is the focus and what the zoom is happening in terms of what the actual camera is to the tracking there's nothing really out there bar this big old box and this little little camera which goes on top so this place is amazing there are about three different size screens here currently in place a driving simulator one over there and of course a little window scene as well which has a another bunch of LED panels behind it as well we of course gave them our USB stick with our scene on it they're going to make sure the tracking works and they're going to make sure that the camera first room is all set with this large curved screen as someone who comes from an indie background and has to usually do all of these things myself well it's refreshing and very nice to have people doing it for you but they're a studio and that's what they do for us the problem is going to be more of a creative one of making sure that our foreground matches our background and that we can start to knit the elements together but I had some questions about pixel pitch which is the distance in millimeters between each pixel on the screen and it could impact our image to pixel pitch is 2.3 with that pixel pitch what does that mean for the distance we can be from the screen itself at least 2.3 meters away from the screen but moire is a thing and appears at various focal lengths angles you can see it immediately um on the monitors which is nice you can see it before you take the shot so I guess we're going to be looking at trying to keep the screen a bit soft a little bit but not as soft as you would think this is a genuinely very pretty environment and it would be nice to see it in its Glory rather than a soft fuzz behind you this is my friend Andy he's a dop and a damn good one at that this man's very kind this man is a Fountain of Knowledge when it comes to lighting and cinematography how much experience with virtual production do you have not much but enough to have said we have done some of it so we did a stitch in time which was rear projection in a living room with a white sheet yeah I mean it was all part of the aesthetic what things do you think you're going to learn here today that you have not experienced before running a big project like this you want to think about your crew times your higher times all that kind of thing from my understanding of how the technology works you you switch the focal depth on the background wall as well to compensate because it needs to know you've switched to a 50 you need to switch to a 50 you can't generate so it's understanding the world around and that affects things like scheduling and absolutely absolutely because you need to know is this going to take five minutes 10 minutes these are all things have to do in the engine in your lighting plans and I know in this instance you weren't involved in the building of the scene as much basically I had one request and that was depth I was like I really want to make sure that we we had an environment that wasn't just you know there's a hill in the background and Fields we wanted like a textured layered environment it's going to be fascinating it's going to be fascinating treating this as a an actual production we would know what the kit is beforehand and we would get the lenses mapped from Moses what they give us an essential lens file per lens and when a lens is swung out or swapped and we essentially reload that file into Moses which tells unreal what it's trying to to render the two encoders essentially need to be reset back to zero points on the back of it there is a lens zeroing point you press and hold Len zero the frost drum on the screen goes a little weird you take it all the way in One Direction you take it all the way in the other direction and all the way back for the focus ring and then the same with zoom and that is it now corresponding to the correct um focus and zoom is what the lens is doing so the scene is actually now currently running via end display onto this massive LED wall which is hugely satisfying by the way but there are some issues I may need to go into the project and start removing items just to try and bring the performance back up because if we can't get the performance back up over 25 frames per second solid it's not going to work we've got seven frames per second at the moment we've got the FPS and start GPU running we can see that something is taking up a lot of draw time so lumens having an effect we're just tearing a few things off and see what happens I guess and turn them back on and see what we're operating again yeah we're assuming maybe that part of the problem here is to do with the lights that are in the scene because they are quite Hefty there's a lot of light and there's a lot of detail that the lights are passing through maybe maybe I don't know if that's made much of a difference to your frame rate though I really thought we'd have a bigger increase so we're just looking over the scene right now just trying to find ways to boost the frames per second it's a solid 30 in the editor I didn't expect they would be uh an issue but we're not getting very high frames per second when it goes out to the screen so I need to find something in here it's the complexity really of it isn't it it's it's the if you want to push a lot of content onto the back screen is it worth doing something that would be equivalent to a pre-light would you hire it a day ahead go in load it do your lighting setups to check your lighting plans ahead of time and then just make sure it'll run smoothly oh very nice so because we're having some frame rate issues we're not going to do any live tracking for our demo but we are going to do a static shot so the camera is currently set up for that static shot you can see here on the screen we've got our Thruster in shot we've got our crashed ship and a bit of the tree line so I'm plenty happy with that as a test so what we're going to do is we're going to stand me in and we're gonna mess with the lights and we're going to try and get a nice blend and get the exposure balance right and just end with something that we can take home what is your focal length on there uh it is a 40 I think okay yeah 40 try 35. it took fine yeah I suppose we can tilt up a little bit we don't need too much of the uh Thruster at least because then we can see where the key light is coming from we've got one light down here that's being our Thruster light how is that being dialed in Via DMX and then you've got these three Sky panels doing our same our diffuse over the top that could just stand in and it should hopefully it should start lining up a bit all right well let's have a look there's obviously a bit of spill on onto the back we thought if we took the trust down yep the backlight panels they could be taken down a bit as well because there's not that much really coming off of that it's not like strong sunlight yep and you keep that overhead fill Yep this is nice if you take a step forward past the trust I'll bring it down [Music] how's that looking do you think in terms of levels Andy is it too much it depends on how like the distance right you could probably because you've got this in frame it's basically supposed to be that yeah I'd say that's better yeah just so it's catching slightly a little bit yeah cool I mean I know we're not getting the crazy frames per second but is that and that will obviously translate to cool focuses and anything like that not that much no because I could do a walk-in pull focus and turn put your left hand out for me just so I can get a focus mark foreign [Music] there is one more thing that we wanted to cover and that is to do with bokeh there's something we just discovered and that's these two bokeh in the back so this is the two thrusters on the back of the spaceship now when you throw them out of focus on the camera what you would expect is kind of a crisp hard-edged bokeh if it were real life yes exactly so there is a reason that that's not happening at this moment in time it's because they are an emissive texture rather than a light source so although it is showing up as as you'd expect and unreal as as emitting light it's not actually emitting light if that makes sense because we've done some back projection work in the past and that's a characteristic of back projection soft bokeh that just don't blow out the way normally they do and the last thing you want to do is end up in a studio like this and find out that these things aren't happening so that's a really cool thing to know so this goes back to what we were talking about earlier of where your pre-production is is in such a way that the the pre-light of this would be that that as a lighting element would be treated as a pre-light section so you bring this up go oh no we need to change this change those to be an actual light so it's not a mess of and then come back and play with it huge huge huge thanks to the people here at Night Sky Studios to actually have us to host us and they've just been so so accommodating and amazing so I'm looking forward to doing more work with these guys to to build more scenes and try things out I am certain this is not the last time we are going to be here I think this is going to be the start of something really fun this was such a big video to put together that tons of stuff ended up on The Cutting Room floor so if you want to see more from my visit to Night Sky Studios there are exclusive Clips on my patreon and in one particular one we get an up close and detailed look at the Led panel I've also been posting extended versions of my YouTube tutorials plus there are some VIP perks for my Discord which you should join Anyway by the way because it's now filling up with some really cool and knowledgeable people so if you like the work that I do on this channel please head over and consider becoming a patron links are in the description and I'll see you on the next one

Channel: Joshua M Kerr

Views: 8,081

Keywords: led wall, virtual production unreal engine, virtual production unreal engine 5, virtual production studio, led wall virtual production, led wall video background, unreal engine 5, unreal engine 5.1, unreal engine for filmmaking, unreal engine for film, unreal engine filmmaking, unreal engine movie, unreal engine 5 filmmaking, unreal engine virtual production, unreal engine virtual production mandalorian, mo sys, mosys camera tracking, mosys star tracker, led walls

Id: bia3F4KbLlA

Length: 11min 40sec (700 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 15 2023