Virtual studio

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The term virtual studio can refer to any number of technological tools which seek to simulate a physical television and/or film studio. One such use of the term follows.

A virtual studio is a television studio or film studio that allows the real-time combination of people or other real objects and computer-generated environments and objects in a seamless manner. A key point of a virtual studio is that the real camera can move in 3D space, while the image of the virtual camera is being rendered in real-time from the same perspective, therefore, this virtual scene has to adapt at any time to the camera settings (zoom, pan, angle, traveling, etc.). This is what differentiates this new technique, called Virtual Production,^[1] from the traditional technique of chroma key. A virtual studio does not require post-production because it is in real-time. Virtual Production uses emerging Extended Reality (XR) technologies. Using XR, film crews project virtual 3D virtual environments on giant LED screens inside semi-circular ‘Volumes’. Virtual Production requires a 3-D graphic artist and 3D computer graphics software are needed to create the virtual background and any graphics that appear in front.

There exist many technical solutions for creating virtual studios, but most of them include the following components:

• Camera tracking, that uses either optical or mechanical measurements to create a live stream of data describing the exact perspective of the camera.
• Realtime rendering software, that uses the camera tracking data and generates a synthetic image of a television studio.
• A video mixer, which combines the video from the camera with the video from the realtime rendering software to produce a final video output. One of the most common ways to mix the video to replace a chroma key background.

See also[]

• Extended reality
• Economics of movies made entirely using virtual production techniques
• Game engine

References[]