Virtual Production Stages Move From Film Sets To Rental

Crescent Inc. has detailed the LED volume at the centre of its Digi-Cast Haneda Studio in Tokyo. The main wall measures 41.5 metres wide by 10 metres high and uses AUO panels at a 1.95 mm pixel pitch and 2,000 nits. Two movable side walls of 6 by 6 metres and an LED ceiling of roughly 23.5 by 15 metres complete the enclosure, with the ceiling split into nine independently height adjustable sections so it can be flown out of shot. The processing is the interesting part: 27 Brompton 4K Tessera SX40 LED processors and 57 Tessera XD 10G data distribution units. Crescent describes the stage as one part of a Link-All concept that also houses motion capture, volumetric video and photogrammetry.

Five days earlier Brompton confirmed a considerably smaller volume at VG Media Studio in Laichingen, near Stuttgart. Just over 100 square metres of LG LED are driven by two SX40 processors for the wall and an S8 for the ceiling, each SX40 paired with two XD 10G boxes. The system runs at up to 60 frames per second with headroom to 120. Mo-Sys tracking supplies markers that the tracking system sees and the production camera does not, Frame Remapping gives each camera in a multi-camera shoot its own feed, and Custom Markers put cues on the wall for the crew without appearing in the shot. The facility has about 250 square metres of floor in front of the wall plus a 70 square metre conventional studio, and has already hosted car commercials and a feature shot in July.

What separates these two projects from earlier virtual production installations is the business model. VG Media Studio did not set out to build a stage; it set out to rent facilities, equipment and know-how to external production companies. That changes the engineering brief. A wall built for one film can be aligned once and left alone. A wall rented by the week has to be reconfigured between clients, which means colour pipelines saved as presets, per-show processor layouts, and data cabling that can be re-patched without a site survey. The scale is also worth translating into pixels: 41.5 metres at 1.95 mm pitch is roughly 21,000 pixels across and over 5,000 down, about 27 megapixels. A single 4K canvas covers 8.3 megapixels, so a wall of that size cannot be treated as one screen. It is a tiled array of canvases with a shared colour target, and the 57 data distribution units are the reason the tiles stay in step.

For anyone specifying the AV around such a stage rather than the LED itself, four budgets matter. Power and cooling are the first: LED, processing and tracking at this scale are a kilowatt class load with heat to match, and rental schedules leave no room for thermal throttling mid-take. The second is structured 10G data cabling with slack loops, because a processor rack that cannot be reached during a changeover is a lost day. The third is genlock and timecode, which is where AV and broadcast merge. The fourth is the feed path to the confidence monitors, the record racks and the producer desk, which is ordinary AV work but unforgiving work: fixed EDID per output, scaling applied once, and a matrix that can route the same source to a reference monitor and a recorder without renegotiating. Amtune builds seamless hybrid matrix and multiview processors and HDMI matrix switchers for exactly that layer, and HDBaseT extenders for the runs between stage, rack and production office. Stage layouts and signal lists to sales@amtune.com.