Category: Mo-sys

Mo-Sys Engineering joined forces once again with 3LR Lighting and Bendac to showcase the latest in ICVFX final pixel virtual production at the Media Production & Technology Show 2023. 

Mo-Sys is synonymous with industry leading precision camera tracking for Virtual Production, and showcased the latest version of its StarTracker technology, StarTracker Max. StarTracker Max delivers real advantages over its predecessor, with a smaller and lighter on-camera unit making it much easier to use with Steadicam and handheld cameras. The new platform also provides even greater accuracy, and the software architecture has been designed to allow for new functionality in the future, including a web interface to be introduced shortly.

Completing the seamless blend between real foreground props and the virtual scene, Mo-Sys’ partner 3LR Lighting provided Electronic Theatre Controls lighting with a world-first x8 color LED chip array, including Indigo, Blue, Cyan, Green, Lime, Amber, Red, and Deep Red. This innovative lighting solution created a quality of white light never seen before and eliminated color de-saturation when mixing colors.

ETC’s range of Film and TV fixtures offers metameric control and is the only fixture to have installed color integrity control. Additionally, ETC’s luminaires utilize Droop Compensation algorithms to ensure consistent color and output throughout shoots, overcoming the problem of LED’s becoming less efficient as they heat up, which can result in a loss of output and cause potential color matching issues in post-production.

These LED fixtures offer perfect color homogenization to any LED volume and enhance any traditional Film or TV set with a true full spectrum LED light. With an unparalleled warranty of 10 years, ETC’s lighting solutions offer spectral content unlike any other lighting fixture in the Film and TV and photo market today, covering 94% of REC 2020.

For more information about Mo-Sys’ Virtual Production Solutions, please contact info@mo-sys.com.

For more information about 3LR Lighting, contact Barry Grubb at barry.grubb@3lrlighting.com.

As a recession looms and competitors shrink their budgets for marketing and internal communications, forward-looking businesses are gaining an advantage by utilising Virtual Production to reduce costs, while dramatically increasing their capacity to create engaging ads, training videos and corporate presentations, all in-house, and for a fraction of the cost with much smaller teams.

The marketing team at Salesforce has successfully utilised this lean, recession busting approach and has now fine-tuned the process as an independent studio using Mo-Sys technology. Now capable of producing outstanding content with a production team that has seen its number reduced from 35 to 5, and able to shoot inside a regular central London office space, this new-look production house is shooting, editing and publishing enormous volumes of content quickly and at a fraction of the cost.

Using digital filming foregrounds and backgrounds, they create locations on the computer instead of traveling, then VP filming techniques enable them to quickly switch from one location to the next. VP technologies have evolved and gotten so good that shooting in an office space can give good results depending on what you are trying to achieve.

Virtual Production has helped the film industry to film in worlds that do not exist, but this normally increased budgets rather than reducing them. With new technology and especially LED backgrounds, a lot of the filming complexity is gone, which brings VP in reach of non-Hollywood applications.

Green screen filming has been around for 83 years, but never made it into mainstream filming as it is difficult to merge virtual and real worlds in a believable way. While you can replace the green with a virtual background, even around fine hair in close ups, it becomes more challenging when shooting with reflective surfaces like glasses, water, or shiny skin.

What helps here are the new LED walls being used as live backgrounds and with a changing perspective as the camera moves. It is like filming with a real background. A big part of the lighting from the scene is already achieved and it can be filmed live rather than requiring postproduction.

Companies are under huge pressure to create content, and lots of it. Fuelled by changes in our viewing habits and the unprecedented growth of streamers and social media, pressure has been building on companies to adapt their marketing strategy, to embrace new formats and create more to meet this demand, or risk failing to attract and engage customers.

Marketing teams are now able to engage new customers, with more content than ever before, while also de-risking experimentation with this cost-effective and rapid Virtual Production.

Mo-Sys Marketing Director, Stephen Gallagher said:
“In-house marketing teams can create content at any location without leaving the office. So, imagine having the freedom to shoot in different cities, a flagship store, hospital, kitchen, up a mountain or on another planet without the need to book studio time, scout locations or travel. VP is such a powerful tool! For example, a clothing brand could respond in real-time to weather reports, switching their focus to shorts and t-shirts if it is sunny. And during a recession, brands can move rapidly into the void left by competitors scaling back – it’s like having an open goal to shoot at.”

Corporates looking to pair back their marketing budget as the economy contracts not only stand to miss out on the opportunity to expand their reach but also leave a gap for their competitors to exploit. Companies are already moving to seize the moment and have begun developing their own in-house VP studios to utilise this approach.

Virtual Production is no-longer the preserve of Hollywood or regarded as an exotic and costly means of producing content. It has been democratised and forward-thinking organisations are capitalising now.

Contact Mo-Sys to learn more about corporate Virtual Production solutions.

Mo-Sys Engineering will demonstrate a new hybrid approach to final pixel (ICVFX) virtual shooting at the HPA Tech Retreat (booth 720, Innovation Zone, Mission Hills Rancho Mirage, 20 – 23 February 2023).

This innovation gives directors and cinematographers great flexibility and can significantly reduce costs without compromising quality in any way. To give directors the freedom to create a cinematic experience including wide shots and close-ups in final pixel LED virtual production, up until now you needed a very large LED volume which is expensive to implement. Mo-Sys’ solution is to shoot wide shots against a green screen, and the mids and closer shots in an LED volume which can now be much smaller. 

For this approach to work, the image quality has to be precisely matched, and the director needs to be able to switch immediately from one to the other to meet production workflows and timescales. With the green screen and smaller LED volume on the same stage, the lighting can be matched and the performers and technicians can move freely from one to the other. 

Underpinning this is a unified system for content serving and camera tracking. Mo-Sys StarTracker is widely recognized as the leader in precision camera and lens tracking for movie and television production. VP Pro XR is the company’s powerful LED content server solution, built as a plugin which sits natively within the Unreal Engine, and tied closely to StarTracker to ensure perfect synchronization, and even focus pulls between real and virtual objects. 

“The industry is learning how best to use virtual production and is keen to use the benefits within practical production workflows and budgets,” said Michael Geissler, CEO of Mo-Sys. “We have taken the largest exhibition booth at HPA to show how practical it is to use multiple techniques in a single scene, so the actors and crew can work through the shots as they would do on a physical set. This is a real game-changer in the viability of virtual, final pixel production.”

Mo-Sys is a world leader in image robotics, virtual production and remote production solutions. With over 25 years’ experience, Mo-Sys holds an enviable position as production partner to high-profile prime time entertainment shows and live sports broadcasts. The Mo-Sys product range spans turnkey LED virtual studio system integration, remote heads and broadcast robotics, mechanical and optical camera tracking for augmented reality and Virtual Production, and on-set visualization.

Mo-Sys is proud to announce its involvement with Netflix latest hit Dance Monsters, a powerful heart-warming competition where amateur dancers are disguised as CGI avatars competing to win $250,000. The creative vision behind the show pushed the boundaries of possible and led technology partners to adopt a collaborative, knowledge sharing approach to overcome complex challenges and develop workflow improvements to achieve ambitious goals. 
 
The resulting show successfully pioneers the use of performance capture for dancers, targeted onto avatars for a live audience. The ground-breaking combined use of technology meant contestants could see themselves in real-time as their Monsters, empowering them to push past personal inhibitions and perform with confidence, immersing singers into their character and the overall creative concept. 
 
Mo-Sys deployed VP Pro, its complete solution for virtual production with a full suite of creative tools embedded directly within Unreal Engine for augmented graphics, virtual sets and mixed reality. The team also utilised Mo-Sys’ award-winning StarTracker optical camera tracking to precisely track the position of six moving cameras, and deliver live compositing. The resulting camera and lens data was combined with the Motion Capture data in Mo-Sys VP Pro and Unreal, to render the monsters in AR live on stage. 

James Uren, Mo-Sys Technical Director explains: “It has been a real pleasure to work with Lime Pictures on this technically challenging project. The early collaboration across all technology partners to deliver a world-class production has been key to the success of Dance Monsters.”

James adds “A total of six Mo-Sys VP Stations  – synchronised on-set Virtual Production rendering carts were used. One for each camera chain and one for recording and backup. Mo-Sys recorded the movement of the cameras, lenses and lights, so the Monsters could be re-rendered at an even higher quality in an automated post-production pipeline.” 
 
Mo-Sys’ VP Stations reveal some impressive production numbers; 856 takes amounting to 20 full days of recordings and 40 million key frames of data. And the result was the ability to have a Live preview of the show with AR ‘monsters’ on a real stage, allowing the production team to film complex camera sequences of dances and interviews, with all data recorded and delivered to post-production to enable an automated re-render pipeline. 
 
Mo-Sys is delighted to learn that Dance Monsters has been nominated for the 2023 Producers Guild of America Innovation Award which recognises production of noteworthy, impactful new media programs that significantly elevate the audiences viewing experience. We wish our friends and colleagues at Lime Pictures every success at the PGA Awards ceremony. 

Watch now on Netflix.