The Virtual Production of The Mandalorian Season One

This video has a lot of examples: [VIDEO] Part of the idea is to do as much as possible in-camera, by rendering the virtual surroundings at a high enough quality to directly film them as the actors' backdrop. It's sort of like a wildly more advanced version of using matte painting backdrops. It also seems far better for actor immersion than green screen, as the people on camera get a live wraparound view of the virtual 'set'.

Take a look at how they filled the Mandalorian. Quite a lot of it was filmed inside a large video wall / cube. One of the big advantages for them was that it resulted in far more realistic lighting. [VIDEO]

The advances they've made in virtual production studio backdrops are amazing. Camera-linked floor-to-ceiling 180° LED screens and synced lighting is just amazing. The stuff they're able to do in The Mandalorian is incredible. Though once you know what to look for (the camo hiding the floor/wall seam) you can tell they're using it a bit too much. But still it's incredible. [VIDEO]

> That was done for lighting. I don't think that's correct, the ILM team presented this technology in a video: [VIDEO] (paraphrased) "it was designed to both light the actors and be a background that we can photograph, so that we end up with real-time live pixels in-camera" Also from the article you linked: > If the content was created in advance of the shoot, then photographing actors, props and set pieces in front of this wall could create final in-camera visual effects — or “near” finals, with only technical fixes required, and with complete creative confidence in the composition and look of the shots. I'm not an expert in film terminology but it does not sound by any stretch that this was primarily about lighting.

If you think this stuff is neat, there's a neat improvement on this using what are essentially video walls. Replacing the greenscreen removes the problems with green or white, and gives presentors/actors better idea of their space. Tom Scott did a quiz series showing off the technology, linked to timestamps where he explains things: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] See also roughly the same technique being used in the Mandalorian TV show: [VIDEO]

They apparently did a lot of the cgi in real time with an curved led wall and some version of unreal engine. They track the camera position so they can move the image on the screen to match properly and They only render high resolution what’s in the camera viewport and the other stuff just provides some nice realistic ambient light. ILM video: [VIDEO] [LINK]

> I walked away from this (um, got up from the sofa) thinking Epic’s gambit is to push Unreal Engine 5 as a virtual movie set I think they have been doing this for quite some time already: [VIDEO]

Not so sure about post-production rendering, if anything movies are moving to real-time rendered CGI environments [1]. Unreal/Epic have been a big player in this space. [1]: [VIDEO]