ZERO COST Virtual Production And Everything Beyond

what does virtual production actually cost well before you go out and buy an LED wall I'm going to break down every piece of software and equipment from $0 to the most expensive so you can figure out what you can afford I've spoken to real industry professionals to get these figures so get ready these things ramp up really quickly let's start with the essentials while primarily game development software Unreal Engine is also used by artists and Studios to create 3D environments and run them in real time alongside its incredible Graphics capabilities unreal has a vast vir Production Tool Set like the ability to stream in high quality video 3D camera tracking data and moap data and tools for creating live composits so you can preview visual effect shots on set at this point unreal is basically the Cornerstone of virtual production and it is used at every budget level if you're using version 5.3 of Unreal Engine or lower then it is in fact free but if you're making a film in version 5.4 or higher once your product reaches a million dollar in Revenue you'll be required to pay a license fee per seat but license is aside Unreal Engine 0 yes we're doing this in dollars dollars are cooler sorry England next up is lightcraft jetset the sponsors of this video and for good reason the jetset app for iPhone is hands down one of the most incredible virtual production tools out there for instance I've been playing around with this really amazing sci-fi scene that I got free on epic's Marketplace and what Jets allows me to do is load that scene directly into the iPhone and then shoot on a green screen then once you've got your takes you can send the footage and the 3D tracking data across to Unreal or blender or nuke or after effects then key out the green and boom you're in your virtual environment that's what virtual production looks like on jetset for $0 they also have jetset Pro which is $20 a month and that unlocks 4K recording remote video monitoring and 3D set scanning there's also Jet Set cine which I'm going to cover in a bit as we get to the higher cost setups next on the essentials list is blender a 3D modeling and animation software that you're already probably well aware of it has really amazing 3D modeling tools and simulation tools and any assets that you create in blender can be sent over to Unreal for use in real time virtual production and once again $0 now we're talking lowbudget here not no budget with all of this glorious free stuff comes a cost we need Hardware I'm not going to go too deep into computer costs but I do have some rough figures for illustration purposes a searched up the minimum requirements for running either unreal or blender and a machine that matches those specs could cost you around $800 to $1,000 but if you wanted a more serious machine based on a typical workstation at epic games you could be looking closer to $1,850 beyond that the cost of a computer could be as long as a USB cable where is this coming from if you plan to use the jetset app then of course an essential piece of Hardware is an iPhone I'm currently using the iPhone 15 Pro Max which on Apple costs about $1,200 the jeta app does work on previous generations of iPhone as long as they have a liar sensor because that's essential for the tracking but the further back you go in generation the less geometry you might be able to load for virtual production you may want a few other things like a green screen searching Amazon for a green screen is going to show you loads of lowc cost options and a lot of them are not great materials I'm a huge fan of the westcot green screen I've got behind me on Amazon they go for about $80 it's felt and all you need to do is pull it tight and that'll get rid of any creases it beats the hell out of ironing you'll need lights too lights to light the green screen and lights to light the talent separately and it does depend entirely on the scene that you're trying to make but if I was going to give you a general recommendation if you're starting out and working in a small space like this a pair of LED panels is a really good starting option kns panels cost somewhere between $150 to $200 as for the green screen I would recommend getting a pair of RGB sticks what you're really looking for here is a light that can output an RGB value cuz I can light the green screen here with a green color which really helps the key Neer of course is always the lowc cost option and has RGB stick lights for around $450 for two and that brings the total for low budget virtual production to $4,000 that's $4,000 and you're just shooting on an iPhone what if we want more abilities like to shoot on our Cinema cameras not just the iPhone and also get a live lighting preview so we can see what our shots going to look like on set well to do that we need to dive into the low to medium cost options this is where it becomes really obvious which parts of virtual production still have the big price tags one area that has opened up hugely is 3D camera tracking this is where you record the position of your main cinema camera when you're filming and then your virtual camera which is capturing your virtual background will move in exactly the same way as your main camera there are loads of options for this and I'm going to go through them in order of price first up is lightcraft Jet Set which when used on its higher tier Jet Set cine opens up a world of possibilities by mounting the iPhone on top of your cinema camera you can do full 3d track of your camera's position and then stream that data directly into Unreal Engine and when paired with an axu cimo Pro you're able to do full lens calibration as well which solves the offset between the phone and the camera lens Distortion and entrance pupil calculations it does the lot the guys at lightcraft have also developed autoshoot which is a piece of desktop software that can take in anything you've shot with your cinema camera and sync it with the tracking data you've captured with Jet Set and then send it to whatever you want to use it's basically a un ified system that gets everything into post the axon seimo Hardware costs about $200 and Jet Set cine is $80 a month there's also anti-latency which I have used and have right here actually that's the alt tag that you attach to the camera and then it looks for specific markers that you place down on the floor or overhead on a truss I use their smallest tracking setup which is 2.4 m x 2.4 M and only just about fits in here and that comes to about $2,000 there's also retracker Bliss which is a bit different it's a stereo sensor that goes on top of the camera apparently it's a very good system I haven't used it myself but it's supposed to be very robust it additionally has a Fizz box which is for Focus Iris and zoom tracking and works with unreal engines lens calibrator its top package comes to $2,800 and finally Vive Mars which uses HTC Vive trackers like this one to record the position of the camera in 3D space and also Vive Bas stations like this one to set up the tracking volume the Vive Mars also has a Mars Rover which is used for camera calibration and tracking Focus Iris and zoom of your lens but I will say that Vive do sell their trackers and base stations separately as Standalone so you can do a kind of rough camera tracking setup with a single tracker and a single base station and that's what I did when I first started out but doing it this way is a little fiddly getting the position of the tracker right and also there's no way to do lens calibration or set the origin in an easy way and that's why the Mars exists to solve those problems full price of the Mars comes to about $5,000 and is the most expensive tracking system in this low to medium budget range but the real area where the costs start to creep in is live keying so if you're working on a green screen set and you want to remove that green screen live then you're going to need some sort of keying solution that works in real time now you can do keying for free in Unreal Engine they have composure which is a tool that will allow you to key out any background color but it's very rough it's not production quality in my opinion if you're just looking to do a rough preview for onset then it's totally fine but if you want anything higher quality which you probably do these are the options ultimat from Blackmagic is a hardware key that takes the feed from your cinema camera and then has tons of controls to dial in the perfect key it's actually easy to get lost amongst the amount of controls they have but it does have incredible output ultimat are used very commonly on blue and green screen sound stages especially when there's a need to create a production quality mat live on set for instance Live Events where you need to have broadcast quality output right there and then and of course you could send the output from the ultimat to a Blackmagic hyper deck and record the final output no post Blackmagic have 8K versions of the ultimat and they cost $7,000 it also has a 4K version at $2,500 and an HD version at $900 which would probably be great for onset preview but I wouldn't use them as the final key and a black magic hyperdeck for recording the output would probably set you back about [Music] $2,700 I've got Fiverr now seems like a good time to mention axry which is virtual Studio software and is often used in things like Live Events but I'm mentioning it here because it has a built-in software KY this thing's really good I haven't used it myself but the results do tend to look amazing and head and shoulders above unreal's built-in composure key and it has other compositing effect effect like light wrap and the ability to cast a good Shadow onto the 3D environment I'm quite tempted to dive in on this thing because its Studio plan is free but watermarked and if you want the watermark removed you just have to pay $20 a month beyond that free Studio plan they also have a professional plan which opens things like ndi support and that costs $2,290 and then they have their broadcast plan which opens up multi-gpu support and multimachine synchronization so you can get a lot more camera input as well and that's $579 these prices are their lifetime licenses so you would be buying the software outright in comparison to those costs $20 a month for a live green cure it's looking pretty good actually whether you need to get the Unreal Engine background out to an ultimat or your video camera signal into a symmetry whatever method you've chosen the chances are you're going to need some sort of capture card to get video in and out of the computer luckily Unreal Engine makes choosing one super simple because they Port so few first up is the cam link 4K this thing's really good it takes an HDMI signal in from your cinema camera and then USB 3's into the computer and uh I'm surprised that real actually supports this thing to be fair cuz it's a cheap little option at $100 I think if you're running on a budget cam Link's great we used it recently at NAB and BSC I was doing some of lightcraft Jet's demos there and I think when it comes to video input and I'll put unreal is the one with the quirks the cam links totally fine after the cam link the only other support options are black magic decklink or AR cards and they go straight into the pcie slot on a motherboard these things are a little bit more expensive they tend to support either SDI or HDMI sometimes both very robust and low latency Blackmagic deing cards tend to be the next most expensive costing up to about $11,000 but AR cards on the high end cost about $4,000 where's that wallet gone now it's hard to get an exact number for this category because there are so many options and configurations but I have figured out a range this low to mid category will cost anywhere between $6,000 all the way up to $20,000 which will probably tell you that the next category is where things get really crazy this category is for when you want a seriously good virtual production result without the friction of building your own Studio because if you're working at high budget you're most likely looking to hire a virtual production stage so I reached out to a couple of Studios to give me a guide cost for what this might be this is what they told me to hire a large green screen based version production stage for a week which includes two cameras in a studio space set up for multi- camera shooting all cameras 3D tracked in position Focus Iris and zoom lighting rigs overhead computers to run Unreal Engine live and a full crew including camera operators and people to operate the virtual scene live 50,000 to $8,000 per week and the reason the range is that wide is because sometimes Studios make a allowances for smaller scale Productions they might charge less if you're doing a music video or a short film it's still a lot of money if that doesn't make you sweat then it's time to discuss LED walls I remember when I first found out what they did on the Mandalorian season 1 all the way back in 2019 I got kind of obsessed with LED walls and wanted to know whether I could build one myself in case you're wondering the answer is no but I did do my research and ended up on Alibaba looking at LED panels that were probably both rubbish and still too expensive for me this is not a DIY project unless you've got a lot of space even for a small LED wall you need space between the LED wall and the talent and you need even more space between the camera and the LED wall as well otherwise you're going to get loads of artifacts you'll get light spill don't do it especially not based on a video I made seriously don't do that so again we're approaching this from the perspective of renting an LED wall studio so I asked around for a guide price and this is what I have been told a fully Ked out shoot in an LED wall studio with a tracking system such as a Moses en cam or Stipe 10 hours per day with a full crew to manage the wall will cost 990,000 to 150,000 per week and the range in this case accounts for different sized wall setups sometimes you will get multiple LED walls for a higher as well I've been asked a lot especially at NAB whether jetset can work on an LED wall shoot and the real answer is there's no reason why not jetset just needs to detect feature points in the scene and then you can get a really solid track so yeah this is something I'm quite desperate to try on a future video so pop a comment below if you're interested in seeing that if LED walls are a little out of your price range then I recommend first getting the jetset app which is free on the App Store right now and then watch this video next to see how you can start telling stories with Unreal Engine it's amazing how quickly you can start getting your ideas out of your head and into the world and I'll see you there

Channel: Joshua M Kerr

Views: 5,600

Keywords: virtual production, unreal engine virtual production, iphone virtual production, led wall, green screen virtual production, virtual production unreal engine, virtual production unreal engine 5, virtual production setup, virtual production green screen, virtual production green screen unreal, virtual production greensc, real time virtual production, real time camera tracking, virtual production camera tracking, virtual production cost, virtual production setup cost

Id: ZM7m-_6Vfcg

Length: 13min 56sec (836 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 25 2024