Gaffer & Gear 156 - LED Volume Studio
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- Опубліковано 11 жов 2024
- In this video we cover the mistakes I made, and the lessons I learned from my 1st LED Volumetric studio shoot.
For bookings or inquiries for this studio go to
www.ledstudio.com.au
or contact Leigh Coutie
leigh@xlx.zone
0408 557728
Also a big thank you to the Director / DOP Simon Green
www.simongreen.com.au
Awesome video! One thing to keep in mind is light spill on the screens should be avoided at all costs. We use a lot of floppies and flags to tease light off of everything but the actors. If you look at a lot of your shots, you’ll see sections of the screen that are brighter than others from spill.
A good trick for this is to use false color on the camera. If the shadows of your LED screen match the shadows of your talent, and ditto with your highlights, you’ll have a perfect match.
Thanks
I imagine that this sort of issue would be exacerbated by shooting LOG. The background is really a low DR source while the foreground elements are sort of HDRish, the spill would make thge LEDs even more low DR.
@@davidmcsween Yes! A lot of cinematographers who are new to this also walk on set and go "wow those screens are too bright, lets dim them down" which *further* reduces their DR. We always try and run the screens at 100% brightness and use ND filters for exposure--just like if we were shooting real life.
Indeed avoiding the spill is essential. Spill from the lights but also from wall and ceiling. I have done a few soots in volumes myself in the uk. As a gaffer I often ask the wall technicians for black masks to only display what is necessary.
Yes! Would love to see you make some lighting tutorials or breakdowns!
Andrew, this is an awesome insight into this kind of filming. Incredible results given this was basically a first test project!
Awesome video Andrew, thanks !
The most useful YT channel for cinemamakers! Thanks Andrew!
Amazing! Thanks for this!
This bts is amazing. Thanks for this
Very cool! Thanks for sharing
Such a cool BTS look. Thanks!
Hi Andrew. Great to learn from your experience. Thank you so much for sharing this.
Great insights thank you so much!
You should be proud that they are investing time and money into educating you into this new method. And not just by telling you what to do, but trusting your judgment and ability to teach yourself.
Mistakes are the best teacher, smooth seas do not make skilled sailors.
Fantastic! this is brilliant! Thank you for sharing!
You've covered many great points that are not that obvious at first thought, thanks!
Respect MAN! thanks for your Chanel !
so much info in this video. thank you very much
Great work Andrew. And good tips. Thanks for sharing the knowledge.
The Unreal engine is used for developing computer games. It’s fascinating to see the convergence of cinema and computer games. Great video, recon this one is going to be very popular.
Yeah this guy’s channel is going to blow up.
This is what you really shine at (no pun intended). Your technical knowledge about how to paint a scene is far better for me than the reviews on products. Although I would hate you stopping doing the reviews, sssssooooooo do both!! lol do all the work and produce videos too while I sit on my chair waiting for them lol... an audience can be such A- hole aren't we lol
I love all of your videos. Thank you again for the insight and covering all the bases so well.
I'm prepping a short movie as DP that will be shot in a volume as well. Extremely useful informations here !! Thanks a lot !
Super cool. Thank you. I want to learn more about using unreal with green screen while shooting as well.
Absolute gold mine of a channel. Much thanks for taking your time in sharing your knowledge.
You sir, are a wealth of knowledge. Wish you lived in the US so I could hire you. :)
Great video mate, very interesting stuff here
Quite incredible
Great input and thanks for the insight as we’re building a volumetric studio.
Really interesting Andrew! We are always learning! 🙏🏾
This is great information Andrew. It was good that you let us see you go from floundering to nailed it! We can all relate. There's clearly a huge potential in all of this and also some potential mutation of roles. I could see the CLT/Gaffer becoming more involved in pre-production while some pre-production roles will be moving on-set. I could see a greater integration of RGBWW lighting fixtures into the screen control infrastructure for balancing and levels and of course the screens themselves will be getting better and better. Some lighting support physical infrastructure would be nice as well (like a TV studio). Virtual green-screening/rotoscoping should be possible in the future with higher frame rates.
This is the future folks and there will be casualties and opportunities. Everybody needs to do the research and work out where their skill-set can fit and flourish in this sort of environment.
"Causalities and opportunities" 100%. My fist job in this industry was "Video Tape Operator"
Fantastic insight into volumetric studio lighting. Looks a lot of fun, too! Thank you!
Great to see this technology being used in Australia! Can't wait to see where this goes
Really well put together. Workable real world info. Thanks.
This is a very old episode now, most volumetric screens have a lot more adjustment slowing for easier matching
👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾 wow thanks for this
This is amazing. Almost scary how little auxiliary lighting is required with an immersive studio.
I feel like I can go into a volume wall knowing how to approach lighting, thank you again for another insanely informative video!
Amazing. I would love to work on one of these sets one day. Hopefully as they become more popular, they will also be more accessible. Excellent video!
Terrific insights into what for most of us is a mysterious process. Admire your expertise, can-do approach and willingness to admit that you're still learning. Great work by cast and crew all around. Adding your site to my list of professional development resources. Thank you and well done!
The screen technology has come so for now, the last job I did on one of these they were able to dial the camera settings into the screen so we could just use mono and Bi-colour lights
Great episode! I would absolutely LOVE to see more BTS type episodes, please!
Great video Andrew. I've heard so much about this new technology but it was so interesing to have a more in depth understanding about your approach to lighting it. The short film looks amazing and I can't wait to see your next project with this technology. I'm from Melbourne and work at The Vision House, so it was nice to see some BTS of our Vision House gear on set, as well as Simon at work. I've been loving watching your videos during the lockdown. Fingers crossed were able to get back on set soon.
Thank-you for sharing your experience with us.
It's still so amazing. Sure you can tell the background fake in the church scene (WAY better in the war scene) but it still looks really good ... we used to have much worse with the old rear projection "poor mans process" shots ... in the end these are tools to tell a story and we shouldn;t let their limitations prevent us from telling our stories.
I mostly do post work as a sideline (foley mostly but general editing, some vfx, mograph ...) I'm just a hobyist in terms of film making shooting on a EOSR with cobbled together lighting but I'd kill just to be able to do a setup like that with a few decent high powered projectors. Right now, I've mostly done tests with compositing green screen footage into unreal ... using Unreal as a replacement for Blender (shout out to the Blender mad scientist Ian Hubert) or similar.
The guys over a Andyak / VJUS have one monstrous high end projector in their tiny studio and they got a really amazing series of shots for Nerdforge a while back. Ryan Conolly from Film Riot / Triune films also did some tests a while back both with consumer grade projectors like the LG CineBeam short throw laser projector and with keying in green screen inside Unreal and some of his results were just amazing considering.
Awesome, thank you.
Learned so much from this, thank you for sharing Andrew.
This is amazing
Never even heard of this! Very interesting and amazing.
08:02 The initial "off-color" fail footage looks pretty good to me, lol 😄🤷♂️
But yeah, the shot after of the woman looks better.
Another cool episode, thank you Andrew. In fact you can shoot on green screen and see the result in realtime with Unreal powered software like Aximmetry, for example. You stiil get all the downsides of chroma keying but it makes it so much easier to light the scene.
don't need axximetry, unreal has all you need included.
@@edstoica Agreed. It's just that Aximmetry is way more broadcast, live production friendly and has many tools built in that Unreal lacks .
@@greenscreenprokinorent6467 agreed ;)
what i dont like is that it has its own viewport and logic.
so for simple things you always need to set up i/o blueprints.
I just dont understand why they did not use the unreal editor as main app... ?!?
Thanks for sharing, Andrew.
Well, I’m sold
I have yet to set foot in a studio with this sort of equipment, but if I could, that would be a thrill! I love this amazing technology, the tech hocus-pocus needed to make it work accurately, the huge data bandwidth, the tricky color work. Sadly, I live hundreds of miles from the nearest film or tv production facility of any kind. But, I am inspired to dust off Unreal again and try some new things with it :)
Thanks so much for this brother. Huge insights.
Awesome... Thanks for making it. What is the Name of the film?
Great video, cleared a lot of aspects. Thank you very much!
Man. Thank you.
Amazing and highly informative video. Thank you very much sir. Thank you for explaining how you blended foreground elements and actors by matching color to in camera background elements. This technique is applicable for real world location shooting for those of us who don’t have access to facilities like the one that you used. However, with the technique that you explained, I wonder if closeup scenes couldn’t similarly be done with a large flat screen television provided that foreground lighting and “kickers” are color matched to background elements creating a color immersive environment. I had trouble justifying the financial cost of RGB (etc.) led lights, but it seems they would be absolutely essential for operating quickly in this type of environment when likely paying by the hour for a facility. Thank you again for this excellent video and for all of the great content that you produce. You are making a positive difference in the world. 👍
@@gaffergear Apologies for my lack of clarification on television use as a home background for closeup shots (probably one actor’s face at a time close). I’m referring to persons like myself with smaller budgets using a flat screen television at home in a private residence as a mock version of an LED wall as demonstrated in your video. A home flat screen television would likely not be dynamic in responding to camera movements. However, by color matching foreground elements to a home television as a blurred full frame background without camera movement, perhaps it could work if there is no camera movement. This technique might be needed for a reshoot after shooting at a real location in real life. If the real scene on location in real life were captured on camera, sort of like capturing room tone, without any actors in it, and perhaps at same aperture to match background blur (bokeh) of shots of actors on location, reshoots could possibly be captured with that real world background being displayed at home on a full frame television screen as a background. Naturally the lighting technician for both real world and indoor reshoot scenes in a private home needs to be at the top of their game, but to the common filmgoer at home, on location scenes and LED television background scenes might feel seamless and real. For example, a night shot with flames against the black night displayed blurred (bokeh) on a home television screen full frame background with simulated fire from LED lights on the actor’s closeup seems like it could be passable as adding to rather than taking away from the story being told. I’m curious enough about this to actually do some tests to have it as a tool in my toolbox if needed. I agree very much that an LED screen as a key with its poor CRI etc could wreck a shot and defeat the goal of creating realism and story immersion. That is my fault for my lack of clarification. Thank you for your patience. 😊
@@cobymarcum1442 I've done similar to what you are saying, but with video projectors. You can get a much bigger scale, and fairly cheap
@@cobymarcum1442 I knew that this could be done for photo, but I wondered if there might be rolling bar issues caused by the TV and camera not being in synch. Does the camera's frame rate need to match that of the TV?
@@lowbeampictures729 That is a good point. I don’t know if different televisions have different refresh rates. Some televisions probably have higher refresh rates. As Andrew at gaffer & gear mentioned in his video, high speed camera work in front of LED screens is a problem, whereas high speed camera work is not a problem in front of green screens. I suspect that using a television at home as a background has its limitations, in the same way that bigger cameras are heavy and require heavier tripods etc. but it seems that the upside of using a blurred television background, provided that there are no rolling shutter issues like you mentioned, far outweighs the downsides, provided the results look natural. Large flat screen televisions keep getting bigger and their costs keep getting lower. If a television has good color, it needs only to produce a blurry background and with a wider aperture seeing pixels on the screen shouldn’t be an issue. I suspect that matching foreground subject / actor lighting to the images on the full frame television screen background to make them look natural would be the biggest challenge, but Andrew showed us how he did his version and the results look amazing to my eyes. Thank you for bringing up possible issues with rolling shutter as you have a good point.
@@gaffergear Awesome! Thank you for the tip! 😊
Very informative and interesting, thank you!
Cheers for this episode, Locky! Really awesome insight to the Volume! Waiting to get into one here in Norway. Should be fun! Excited to the next installment you guys have in the works! Keep them coming!
I don't quite understand how much different from rear screen projection the end product ends up being, but this is obviously a big step forward.
It's the perspective changing as camera moves, which I'm sure some clever person could figure out how to do with rear projection.. I've done lots of big rear projection and it ok as long as you don't get on angles to the screen. For example tracking from a front to a side shot.
It's a dam site easier to match lighting to rear projection I have to say..
And rear projection seems to throw more light than the LED screens.
@@gaffergear super interesting! Surprised the rear projection is so bright
Excellent advice thanks for sharing!
You are very generous for sharing this information with us sir. I'm very excited to try this new way of shoot someday. Here in Indonesia we only have 1 side of the screen to shoot with, so it's basically like shooting in front of a giant TV, we couldn't have the reflection from the side or the top. Maybe someday there would be a Lighting artist for creating the virtual environment like in animation production. or the gaffers could simply involved in designing the lighting in pre production. Have you tried the orbiter ambient color matching sensor to this environment ?
I haven't touched an orbitor, but I believe it's RGBALC or something like that, so it would be a very good tool
hey friends, so for smaller and low-budget sets, you can use a hybrid approach:
use a traditional green screen set, but send the camera live feed to your computer, compose it in realtime in unreal and send the final image to some large set-monitors.
So everyone on set can see the final composure result.
then you can dial in your real lights positions and colors to match the unreal background.
then you record video in-camera and in unreal the tracking data, if any.
the good thing is, that nothing is baked. You still have the 2 layers. that allows a extensive post production. and a high quality pathtracing render in unreal, which would not be possible in realtime.
Thank you!
have heard some horror stories. big budget commercials going from 1 day to 3 days long because of 'issues' (lack of experience) with these screens. thank you for your insights.
This was very interesting and promising new technology. Thank you for the video.
I think that the lady in the church had too cool light on her face. I visited a few churces in Europe and here in Sydney, they are generally dark and moody insight, lit by candles, incandescent bulbs, ans sone color light coming through color glass windows - maybe around 3K on average.
The scene behind the guy and lady in another scene with the guns was too blurry to my liking, I felt disoriented.
Fantastic video! Really appreciate the information and explanation. Would love to see more BTS of how you positioned lights behind and over the volume. Any issues of lights blocking trackers?
Light blocking trackers, yes! Especially at the start because the trackers were not high up.
Can't believe I forgot to mention that, it's definitely not a good idea to have octodomes standing by in the volume. If not in use take off the set.
But on the next shoot I did it wasn't a problem because I think they put more trackers in.
So cool!!!
Great info thank you sir
This LED studio can dynamically change background based on camera movement, that's great. But your lights can't change position dynamically in process of shooting. So you can't shoot very dynamic scenes where camera significantly changes position and point of view.
It definitely has its limitations. We did a scene running through a forest and found it was better to turn the tracking off.
Great video and something I have really been researching lately. This would be a guess on your part but would the new Nova P600c be a replacement for the Spectrum 4, or would it be too small?
I went with spectrum lights for the weight, to get them on booms, but I ended up using them as usual stand lights over my 6 skypanels because they generated colours better.
The skypanels colours were very lackluster in comparison, so I would definitely go the new Nova over a Skypanel, but it wouldn't replace the spectrum for weight, or for generating amber's because they are RGBAWW.
@@gaffergear Thanks Andrew.
I've been thinking about working with unreal engine for about a month now and now hearing your approach to lighting the environment within Unreal it's really peaked my interest. When you talk about pulling your key light colors off the environment how do you color match them, with a color meter?
Can't believe I forgot to cover that.
Took readings on Kelvin and hue to get a ball park, then trim by eye off a massive 4K monitor.
I would save about 4 options that I think are good, then Simon would pick one and add his trims if needed.
@@gaffergear thanks for that. Totally makes sense. I've been working with these LED walls for a couple years but have yet to use them with unreal. Hopefully I'll get a chance soon.
Hi Andrew, thanks for a great video. It was very educational. Do you know what make and size of LED panels were used for the LED volume? Thanks.
No idea, they went out of business so I can't ask
That’s a shame. Thanks anyway Andrew.
Great video! I don't think dyslexic is the right word for lack of spacial understanding tho. But it's ok. We are all good at different things.
Maybe its just my taste, but is it possible to use diffusion filters on the camera in this type of shooting and then adjust/compensate for the sharpness of the background? I feel like the characters are too sharp compared to the background and the shallow DOF "just a little too perfect/artificial" compared to a shoot where everything is real. I know you can mask and blur the characters in post but i was wondering if it can be done in-camera. Thank you!
You can absolutely use filtration on camera.
the part about the quality light emitted by the led walls is really important- i tested quite a few that were just at SSI of between 14 and 30
im sure this will change in the near future but for now lights need to be easily matchable and even programmable for compatibility with unreal
Thanks for that information
Hi Andrew, have you heard of anything that links together the video screen to your lights in order to match? or if the camera moves and motivates a lighting cue that could happen automated? my DP says he heard of that, but I can't seem to find anything.
Yes, it's way out of my area of expertise. Google "Pixel Mapping" or mad mapper.
It's becoming easier to do apparently
Hahahah you don't know a not about UE5 thats okay.
I am into it :)
But really thank you for your insights
unreal engine whoooo
i have taken the logos from companies im doing a shoot for and used the eyedropper in photoshop to work out the exact shade, so i can put that into my rgbw lights.
isnt that an option here too?
im shure the volume tecs could read out the exact rgb vallues or even xy coordinates for any of the virtual lightsources.
They mentioned someone working on an algorithm for having hard lights above each row of panels so they can automatically throw the predominant brightest colour forward, such as a neon sign for example. So a gaffer need to add as many kicks.
Problem I find with matching using values is the inaccuracies that are in my lights too, but everything helps to get a ball park.
One thing I didn't mention is that I was heavily using the spectrum lights because the skypanels couldn't match the amber's and reds. RGBW v RGBAWW.
Is the depth of field effect of the background a result of the camera’s depth of field or the resolution of the screens? There are places where it feels a little low res behind the actors, out of proportion to what I’d expect just from a shallow depth of field. Like camera depth of field got doubled up with a low resolution render
Camera lens choice
That’s really interesting (and also, thanks for yet another fascinating breakdown; always love the way you present your thoughts) and this seems to point to possibly an inherent limitation of the volumetric studio approach - the depth of the background is fundamentally illusory - so a mountain in the background at infinity is physically the same distance from the camera as a wall that should be 12 meters away is physically the same distance as whatever part of the background is closest to camera at perhaps just a couple meters away. If the scene is rendered on the fly, how well the renderer manages the appropriate focus falloff to match the lens settings will have a possibly massive effect on how well the image matches what you’d get in real life. This is easier with a green screen in post cause you’re just rendering to a virtual camera. In this approach you have to render to the actual lens so that everything has the correct fall off at the distance of the back wall and then the lens will create the “remaining” falloff. And I don’t know if that’s something the systems do..yet
This is also why the middle battlefield scene seems to be most successful - the nature of the background is the most forgiving
So the seams between the LED set panels aren't visible at all onscreen?
They can be, you have to be careful of distance from camera, and stray light hitting the walls.
Because they are black you get away with it.
Also if you are too close you can see dead pixel rows.
Well, they use unreal because its a game dev engine and it allows to render in real time at high fps (becase games need to render visuals in real time) - wonder how many GPUs they use for that?
you need multiple rigs for that. all running the same unreal project. then you can distribute the panels to the rigs and sync with nvidia nsync.
note, that only the camera frustrum is rendered in high resolution, the rest in low rez.
also note, that the background is shallow in all the shots, so you could get away with full-hd in the frustrum.
@@edstoica so maybe 4 x rtx3090 will handle that?
@@EclipseSound hehe, yes this is a lot of power. but if you put them all in one system you may have other bottlenecs, like interrupts on pci lane or windows interrupting or you cpu's. so the 3d-scene should not be on the limit of your hardware. if you target 60fps, the scene should theoretically run in 100fps, to have enought headroom for glitches and interrupts.
Also you should run the unreal in "play" mode and not in "editor" mode. because the editor ui can eat random ammounts of power.
We use only one machine, with 3090 and P6000. but we do not have a led volume. we do green screen and live composing in unreal.
(still having lots of glitches: ua-cam.com/video/vbnNYVB-8wU/v-deo.html)
cool❤
Great now just need a million dollars to set one up. Then of course for them to make a version of Unreal that filmmakers can use without knowing 3d modeling, etc.
what's the name of the short film?
sheeesh
interesting, so just like shooting out doors, little control over the ambients, so expose for what you cannot change, and compensate with what you can