The Future of Filmmaking is Here!

as you might have seen on this channel we try to make the most flexible and coolest Film Studio in the center of Oslo Norway one of the coolest things about rstudio is the projector which we have used for several music videos however for this shoots we have only used a static background meaning the background didn't correspond with the camera movements so with all the buzz about virtual Productions lately we thought will it be possible to create a mini virtual Production Studio Hair in our small Studio a virtual production setup for smaller Productions it doesn't cost a million dollars to build this is not a tutorial it's more of an experiment to see how far we can push our studio so join us in this experiment where we're going to use the Vive tracking system we're going to use Unreal Engine and also a quite special projector foreign production seems to be the new thing in the film industry with series and films such as the Mandalorian Batman and dune and so on and usually they have these huge LED walls displaying this real-time rendered 3D environment that is connected to the camera with a Tracker so the background or the environment knows where the camera is at all times using this technique gives certain advantages over green screens such as a more natural lighting and Reflections little or no need for post production and actors can act better as they feel they are in the world as opposed to just being in front of a green wall this looks so cool so let's try it in our studio and after all you know we're calling this studio the most flexible studio in the center of Oslo so we should do this so what equipment was needed in order to create such a setup the first thing we needed was a tracking system and through some research we found out that Vice nuclear release Marxism was our best bet this system is tailor-made for virtual production for smaller Indie companies so we reached out to them and they were happy to send over some units for us to loan to experiment with so we have gotten finally the package the HTC Vive March system which is a tracking system but I have no idea how this works so actually I think I have to read the manual for once because this is a lot of after reading the manual and checking out some tutorials it turned out that the vibr system was pretty easy to set up it basically consists of two base stations a Tracker [Music] and the Mars box if you move the camera when projecting a flat image onto the screen nothing will happen and the audience will immediately see that there's something wrong with the background however if you connect the trackers the scene will move together with the camera creating the illusion that the background is part of the set today we are gonna do the first proper test we are going to get some walls in here we're going to project on the back wall then we're going to set up all the stuff The Trackers and see if it actually works foreign are put up high to see where the tractors are The Trackers or Rovers as survive calls them are attached to your camera you can also use another Rover to reposition your scene or attach them to light fixtures for real-time tracking of those these rovers are then connected to your Marsh box which connects everything to your computer however the hardware won't do any good if you don't have the software and normally for richer Productions people use Unreal Engine and this is to create environments in 3D and also to track the camera and create virtual cameras and so on the only problem is that we don't know how to use Unreal Engine I have quite a bit of experience from other 3D software such as blender or Cinema 4D so I thought unreal should be doable however unrealists the least untreated program I think I've ever used this is probably because the program is at its core meant to develop games but which in recent years I've gotten this new use case of virtual Productions because it's so good at rendering realistic 3D scenes in real time the program just haven't caught up to doing this in intuitive way and they're still like hacks that you have to do in order to make stuff work properly so I kind of just wanted to give up foreign [Music] all right let's see what we can do here so the first thing I like to do is to use the invite what we call the environment light mixer and so this is the tool that allows us to very quickly and very easily create a very quick and dirty Sky Sunset anything just a basic lighting setup so we are ready to go and start placing our assets yeah I've been using Unreal since 2008 and so that one with Unreal Engine 3 was out and it kind of always has been game engine but lately since I would say maybe 2016 or so people started using Unreal for more than just games they've been using it for you know virtual production filmmaking uh people use it for feature like full CG movies no uh so it I can't really call it just a game engine anymore because it's not so yeah so I started off my career in the games industry and then eventually I made my way into the film industry instead because I quickly realized that I really just like creating pretty thin nice looking shots and stuff and in games there's always like the performance thing to be to kind of keeping into consideration some of my work I mean I've worked on black panther I've worked on apo's Watchmen and a bunch of other feature film that I'm not allowed to talk about because of ndas uh you know how it is but um yeah so it's been it's been a wild ride so I think having worked in both VFX and in games have kind of give me an Insight really helping me using Unreal because you know I use unreals in 2008 and so I understand the needs of both the VFX world and the game world and windows now that those two worlds are starting to converge um it's kind of giving me a little bit of an edge on the competition so but what should we create on the outside because yeah we have some desert stuff already seems like it it would be nice to have something in the foreground um I don't know if we can download some there is a a new trees pack that we can get on the marketplace that is actually really good for free now the marketplace thing is so easy to get mega scans and make something really quick very exciting time it's still early days but yeah it's coming it's all like playing Lego because now we have all of the assets we need we're using quick soft Mega scan we have Rock we have trees we have plants we've got everything you need to start literally just kid bashing and placing Lego yeah creating your own scene you don't need to have any kind of programming background you don't need to have any kind of 3D modeling background you can just grab what you want and place it in the scene not that long ago like maybe five ten years ago you had to make all of those things make every single Rock every single tree every single plant and that was extremely expensive so imagine for a tree it could take a scene your artist a week or two to make so paying a senior artist full time for two weeks is not cheap so now it's just click and drop so it's uh it's definitely a game changer and so it would be fun to try to create create like a forest outside this window or something like that and maybe when we move the camera then the perspective will change absolutely do you think we have uh what we need to do that like uh absolutely all right we don't need that much so uh we can get ready to get started yeah like foreign now as we have the tracking and the software sorted out there's only one thing left and that's how to show the image on the back wall uh normally like with your Production Studios would use like huge LED walls to do this but we don't have the space for this and also not the budget so we have to do it another another way but we do have a projector hanging in the ceiling could we use that for which reproduction our projector is not like any other Jeep projector out there it is a high-end Norse P2 the Norse is a company based in my hometown Frederick style here in Norway the most beautiful city in Norway actually and it makes these projectors for big clients internationally we were lucky enough to borrow it in our studio as they want to really know how good it was for filmmaking so I thought it would be interesting to check out how are actually these projectors made and how do they even work I headed down to Frederica where I was allowed to enter their facilities before entering the the production inside you have to have some shoe covers on because they are producing Electronics very important that the static electricity is is very low I'm a very grounded person so that's good you're allowed to enter our facility okay thank you [Music] so this is where you assemble this is the other pieces sampling of of the projector so red green and blue are separate as they are here and this is the green one together they make the white light on the full color light of the of the projector as with the RGB pixels we see in most screens the projector also uses a mix of red green and blue light sources to create all the different colors so this particular device the the DMD is a digital micro mirror device so the DMD is basically like a camera sensor but instead of gathering light coming through the camera lens it reflects the light coming from the projector and out inside the projector there are three light sources red green and blue like I have in front of now and the sensor as we can call it has millions of pixels or mirrors like this one to get the different colors it's just tilting the mirrors in different directions so if it wants red it does like this green and blue and if you want to mix a color like you want to mix green and blue you just change between green and blue and it does this several thousand times per second so that will give you a turquoise color because I know on cheaper projector they can turn a certain color over time they go warmer or cooler or exactly so if for some reason the one of the light sources degrade over time we know how to we can adjust the two other colors to maintain the same relative brightness yeah so basically projectors are using lenses that are very similar to the ones we're using in our cameras the light is just traveling in the opposite direction actually it's quite common to use all their projector lenses on cameras for a vintage look and I'm sure if we got our projection lens adapted to our cameras it will make an amazingly sharp lens [Music] most of our products are used in simulators and what is important then is of course High frame rate because this projector is used for simulations and other applications where it's basically running 24 7. this being military flight simulations Formula One teams Museum installation the quality control North does when manufacturing is very thorough they test the projectors by running them several thousand hours and every unit get calibrated to have the exact right colors in the car Industries there are Hyundai's in their Porsche and there are some people are willing to pay more money for something that's better so it's important for us to have full control over the development as well as the manufacturing [Music] now Willam is making the background and it's interesting because there's so many aspects of how to make it realistic like he has to put in what kind of focal length we have now at the height of the camera and sensor size and also it's really cool because we can see live how it looks and it can change the exposure of the outside so now you're adjusting the exposure as you said it should look like it's been filmed so it's probably a bit Overexposed it's nice to see here on the screen like live how much do we still expose maybe a bit darker is that a benefit like to see it in onset absolutely yeah absolutely it's really nice to kind of see in camera VFX is a lot of fun it's really exciting because what you see what you get so it just helped the talent to help the director that helped everyone on set kind of get a much a better preview of what they can expect we also have the RGB lamps in the ceiling so it'll be fun to test it out it's like see if we can recreate the lights from the scene with the aperture lights in the ceiling [Music] not so fun that we are in the kitchen doing this in the kitchen yeah yeah let's do it [Music] okay over there yes and action [Music] foreign so what's interesting to see here is that you have the leaves in the foreground stays in place and then you see the depth and the perspective changes according to accordingly to the camera [Music] the project there has always been like this flat image when we filmed using it in the studio but now it actually felt that there was like a 3D space outside the window it was just based on the tracking of the camera connected to Unreal Engine and then to the projector it just tricked my brain it was just it was so awesome to see oh you can do so many things it's just it's so much fun I'm just looking forward to this more even with this super high-end projector it is cheaper than it were to have an LED wall if you have a cheaper consumer projector you will get similar results that we had during this shoot but you'll most likely have a bit darker image with less contrast and the colors might not be as accurate so if we have the money to spend on a big LED wall that is going to have benefits over our projector the biggest issue we found with this was that the image projected could get quite washed out from our lamps so we had to use black fabric as much as possible around the set to make the light bounce less around the scene additionally your subjects and props cannot be placed too close to the screen as they might cast Shadows this issue can be solved by using a short throw projector creating a scene like this I like for 10 years 10 years ago I think would be really hard it worked but yeah it's not completely out of reach anymore yeah so definitely it's come a long way so then you know it ends up with the it's only your creativity that stops you in a way and guys if you want to check out William's Channel and learn more about Unreal Engine right because that's the main thing on the channel that's my main thing yeah teaching Unreal Engine creating a lot of cinematic stuff and I saw that they created this Halo uh yeah film yeah do you like Halo the game oh yeah this was a really fun experiment and thanks again to William for helping out most likely we're going to make more videos about this testing out experimenting with virtual production so subscribe if you haven't and stay tuned because there are coming more videos very soon on the channel thanks for watching and I'll see you again [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Andyax

Views: 202,360

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Id: MfJxktnOD8Y

Length: 16min 47sec (1007 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 10 2023