Testing A MASSIVE LED Wall - Virtual Production

[@JoshuaMKerr]

There are some fun exlusive videos from our visit to Nightsky Studios on my Patreon. Head over and consider becoming a patron bit.ly/3pcBuBn

[@WoodyDevs]

Having watched this channel for a while, and seen a lot of your small scale set-ups, I am so freaking happy for you. What a cool experience.

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Thanks woody! It really was immensely satisfying.

[@CinematographyDatabase]

cool setup, thanks for the tour

[@JoshuaMKerr]

You're welcome mate! I was just watching your decklink video the other day. I'm just starting to mess around with one here.

[@marcfruchtman9473]

This was really cool to see all the different things happening in the studio. LED walls are amazing because they really help the actors with the scene but, they tend to look flat. It just makes me wonder about ways to improve this.

[@FortisFilmsChannel]

You probably encounter some banding issue as well with the wall (saw it). Adjusting the global shutter is also key. Be sure is Genlock. Hope you did not place the marker on the roof (rig) but on a stable structure like the ceilling of the studio. I did many VP production since 4 years. Let me know if you need help/advice to fix the stage. Knowledge with ARRI / SONY / RED and BM camera system and more.

[@RJWK2702]

Awesome Look at a massive Volume! You didn't happen to get any information on how they were doing the lighting (ARRI skypanels ect) through unreal by anychance? I'm finding unreal's built in DMX plugins a bit lackluster and any little tidbits of info on any third-party software of special techniques would help out immensely. For some more backstory we have a bunch of Rainbow tubes along with an array skypanel style lights all just running through some render targets straight through the Pixel mapping plugin in unreal and it works but performance isn't great and its a bit awkward to run directly along side an Ndisplay machine on a wall or projection.

[@JoshuaMKerr]

The lights weren't pixel mapped in the end, just dmx controlled. I think the colour was eyeballed. I'll be messing with dmx pixel mapped lighting in the future for sure. Thinking of trying some falconeyes lights

[@ZipSnipe]

very very kool !!!! Wow, I am realizing how difficult it is to be an independent film maker. Lighting is so important and I have no clue about it...so much to learn

[@JoshuaMKerr]

We're always learning new things. As long as you enjoy what youre doing it'll never feel like work.

[@PrintThatThing]

Awesome video! Thanks for showing the ACTUAL process. So cool

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Glad you liked it!

[@MrGdm2]

Legendwork matey, thank you for letting us see the BTS of our dreams of our cool ideas!

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Thanks for the lovely comment.

[@iPEMiC.]

A lot of good there, thanks for sharing with us!

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Thanks for watching!

[@VFXHut]

Congrats Josh🎉 - this is an amazing milestone in a filmmakers career. Should be proud of your journey so far!

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Thanks so much. It was a great experience

[@EnterMyDreams]

i learned so much from this!! thank you so much, i’ve had opportunities to get into virtual production with my unreal engine background, you’ve given me a lot of knowledge and take home tips thank you so much

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Glad I could help! Hope to make a lot more informative virtual production videos like this.

[@petecrouch8277]

Very cool Josh, really great work, I bet it was really satisfying to see your world on the large volume.

[@JoshuaMKerr]

It really was. I've had a taste now so I'm itching to do it again.

[@JamalDean-j6c]

Thank you Joshua for the great Infotainment..

[@JoshuaMKerr]

My pleasure!

[@ghassanabdallah1989]

Did you freeze viewports on the Ndisplay? That usually helps performance.

[@JoshuaMKerr]

It does, you're right. I think this was a gpu issue.

[@LiveUPMedia]

Really cool that you are documenting all of this.

[@JoshuaMKerr]

I figured if would be useful to others.

[@madedigital]

that was some good info what was the size of your project in GBytes ? then what render servers did they use

[@JoshuaMKerr]

You know what, I have no idea about the render servers but the overall project was about 200GB. But a lot of that is probably image sequences saved in the content folder.

[@pixelasm]

Thanks for sharing your experience and most importantly the problems you discovered during the process. I have been working with Unreal since early 2022 and found that most tutorials and behind the scenes only show workflows that work and that whenever you just slightly want to deviate from that unreal hits a limitation. Most times those are some unexpected things when you come from a offline renderer #Octane # Redshift #Cinema4d background like I do :P

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Oh absolutely. I revel in finding the parts that are easy to get stuck on and highlight them. I don't like everything to be polished because that's not the experience we have generally speaking.

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Oh absolutely. I revel in finding the parts that are easy to get stuck on and highlight them. I don't like everything to be polished because that's not the experience we have generally speaking.

[@thebuddybud]

Very cool!! Looking forward to more videos like this!

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Glad you liked it

[@itsbonart]

Haha I abasolutely love seeing FreeFileSync in the wild! Little VP and motion graphics designer's secret. I remember my first time jumping into VP world, it felt like we've stepped into the future of film making (this was way before ICVXF templates even existed) and it felt like a playground of my dreams. Love your video and thank you for taking me down the memory lane!

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Glad you enjoyed it, thanks for the comment.

[@elmagicobeats]

What kind of backend was used to push image to the volume? NDI, ST2110?

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Good question. I wish I knew. Will ask them if I get a chance.

[@monsterkajiu1912]

Where's Nightsky Studios located at?

[@JoshuaMKerr]

They're in Scotland, just outside Glasgow

[@LangstoniusRex]

First off: AWESOME Second: did you figure out why there was an FPS drop?

[@JoshuaMKerr]

I think it didn't end up being an optimisation issue but more to do with one or a few of the gpus not running at maximim. But I think it's more complex than even that. Probably a video for another day.

[@LangstoniusRex]

@@JoshuaMKerr hats off to showing the filmmaker spirit and rolling with the punches!

[@JoshuaMKerr]

That's what it's all about man. Cheers

[@svommund]

@@JoshuaMKerr Did you try to bake the light?

[@Ronaldograxa]

Invaluable content! Thank you so much for sharing this!

[@JoshuaMKerr]

No problem. I thought it would be interesting

[@VegasDominic]

Disneys The Mandalorian season 1 said they used 2.8mm pixel pitch so that 2.3mm has higher pixel density 😊🎥

[@JoshuaMKerr]

I forgot about that haha. Very nice

[@mosdaily90s]

I am working in am similar set up studio, facing the fps issues all the time as well, seems there are no straightforward reason cos this. but the Ndisplay seems not used 100% of the gpu power in same projects. Try to hidden everything out the the shots, or build the light.

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Yes, building the light would have been our next step (ran out of time on the day). There was a GPU issue though you're right.

[@yannmassard3970]

I m very suprised by the fps in this video, considering its a 2.5 pitch screen, the resolution must be not really high, the Ndisplay setup might be wrong. @joshua how many Ndisplays GPUS here ? There s something wrong here

[@MrBenjbentley]

⁠@@yannmassard3970hey , I’m Ben from the video. So we’re running 2 ndisplay nodes each with 2 x A6000. 1 running inner frustrum and one for outer. We totally agree somethings not quite right. We’ve been on a job for the last while so not had a chance to poke. We’ve got a chat with Epic to try work out what’s causing the massive FPS drop.

[@danielfeldhusen7726]

Why didn’t you mosaic more than one card?

[@JoshuaMKerr]

This was my first and so far only LED wall experience. Perhaps you could elaborate to help others who come across the issue.

[@MiDaY_i]

wait re-upload?

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Hi man. Yeah sorry, the last one had some unforseen audio issues that I couldn't leave alone haha. Glad you enjoyed it last night though haha

[@CineWorldvfx]

Good Video!!!

[@paulfedor9828]

Another major problem is all LED screens are basically 8 bit TVs.....so you get flat images with no real blacks and no real whites.

[@mariomills]

Amazing 😮

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Thanks 😄

[@pixelwash9707]

Great to see this. I'm troubled about why this attempt failed ie because the frame rate in the editor was significantly faster than in the executable. This seems to be the reverse of the way it should behave. I'm much more familiar with Unity, and in my experience the complied version is always faster. What was the problem in Unreal? I've avoided Unreal because it has a reputation for being very programmer intensive versus Unity to get things running properly, and I guess this experience of yours seems to back up that impression, as I guess you needed to go into the project and optimize it in some way so that it works.......

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Well it isn't running off a compiled executable, It is running from the editor. I believe it was a hardware issue on the day. a couple of GPU's weren't being used to their full extent. But that's the sort of thing you would troubleshoot first before filming.

[@pixelwash9707]

@@JoshuaMKerr For what it's worth this is how I interpret your answer, and your video from my perspective as an experienced 3d guy, but only a very occasional pro maker of video, hence my interest in this YT vid you made.. In the video above, you said that you were having problems with the frame rate, only getting 7 frames per second, instead of the 25 minimum you need. Soon after that (at 6.40) you say: "right now just trying to find ways to boost the frames per second." "so we're just looking over the scene right now just trying to find ways to boost the frames per second - it's a solid 30 in the editor - I didn't expect they would be uh an issue but we're not getting very high frames per second when it goes out to the screen so I need to find something in here, it's the complexity of it really isn't it. Then the studio guy says: "if you want to push a lot of content onto the back screen is it worth doing something that would be equivalent to a pre-light would you hire it a day ahead go in load it do your lighting setup to check your lighting plans ahead of time and then just make sure it'll run smoothly." (Just transcribing KZbin captions here, they are a bit funky.) My comment was based on you saying firmly "- it's a solid 30 in the editor -", and then onscreen at the same time showing the camera smoothly moving around the scene. Hence me thinking you needed to compile the scene to run in on the staging setup, but in fact when you said it is running fine "in the editor" you were referring to the editing SCREEN, and monitor card driving the editing screen, not Unreal's editor environment, and you were having problems playing the scene on the monitor card that the studio had driving the backscreen that was producing the poor performance... My impression now from what you say is that the studio had problems with their hardware. I can only wonder about why the backscreen is not completely independent of the particular video card used to drive it, like any monitor, and you guys just didn't simply swap the video card driving your editing screen with the slow performing one driving the stage set.... Perhaps it uses proprietary video cards to drive it, that perform poorly, and for that reason you need to invest in paying the studio for extra time just so clients can find out exactly how slow their system really is? This doesn't exactly look that good for the studio, lol.... Whatever the reasons for the fail, (and the fail is much more interesting than a success glossing over the process, believe, me, so while it was a fail in terms of getting the studio's setup to work, it definitely was not a fail in terms of KZbin content.) I look forward to seeing you actually getting a setup like this to work properly someday, and really appreciate seeing your work to reach that goal...

[@Dstonephoto]

Lol Carhart pants check; beanie worn indoors check. You couldn’t make this up

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Couldn't you though?

[@Dstonephoto]

@@JoshuaMKerr 🤔

[@ajeebsarkar]

Which brand of led panl

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Roe, but I'm not sure what flavour:)

[@anikdasdigital]

Your videos are amazing. I really like it. I am a new subscriber to your channel. Can I talk with you Joshua?

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Hi there. Nice to meet you. Glad you're enjoying my channel.

[@anikdasdigital]

@@JoshuaMKerr Nice to meet you too. Did you received my email josh?

[@JoshuaMKerr]

@@anikdasdigital I did thanks. Just responded

[@ScorgeRudess]

If you will have bokeh in the background, why don't you just lower the resolution? it actually multiplies your fps

[@JoshuaMKerr]

The final shot wasn't just bokeh. We did a rack focus.

[@constantinosschinas4503]

A video that shows absolutely nothing. Great content.

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Can I ask what you want to see from an led wall video. Perhaps it is something I can cover on future visits.

[@constantinosschinas4503]

@@JoshuaMKerr Thank you for replying. Actual, animating, immersive, believable, usable footage and the process of creating them. Pros and cons compared to compositing (ie. cost). Maybe recreating the the same scene with compositing and led wall. That would be interesting. In which case there is less of on location time? What happens if we want to change something (ie. background). And many others, shown more practically. I can understand that things can go wrong (hope that after your framerate accident they will develop a framerate checklist/guidelines), but the video could be more educational even if that was the case, ie. by analysing and finding what went wrong (doesn't UE have an object/effect performance penalty tool?) or what happens when previewed in projectors, is it only bigger resolution? needs more VRAM? What was the setup? It felt more like an tech exhibition visit than being informative. Digital production is a bit like practical effects vs digital effects (and now vs digital production). So comparison here would be green screen + UE or projection screen + UE.

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Lots of good ideas there, thanks for commenting with them. This was quite literally a journal of a visit and attempt at getting something running from the point of view of someone who has never done it before. As I gain experience with led I'll be able to do more. But there is a lot of top level info in this video as well as bts, I was careful to balance that out. Perhaps it's a bit below your experience level but many have found it useful.

[@constantinosschinas4503]

@@JoshuaMKerr Other comparison to make are ie. realtime tracking vs post tracking (in the latter you can be more accurate and if something goes bad, you just retrack it), green screen + UE vs projection screen + UE (again, compositing can be fine tuned later, easier, keying included). About the lighting talk, we can use UE coordinated lights but with green screen, not projection. In general, realtime projection compositing has some advantages, but it should be combined with some kind of technology or trick that generates a usable key of the foreground as well.

[@Pseudoswede]

Cover the processor side, port loads, redundancy, and color bit depth/HDR, etc.

[@eliucornielle5290]

What a waste of time…. Where is the work.

[@JoshuaMKerr]

I visited a VP studio for four hours, what were you expecting.

[@CaptainMyCaptain33]

I mean no offense, but it looked terrible. It just looked like you were standing in front of a TV with a paused video game. It did not look good at all so I don’t know what you mean by this is the start of something better to come…. Neither you nor they know what they’re doing yet.

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Hi there. Yes the end result could be worked on but we only had so much time in the studio and this was my first experience with LED. The guys at Night Sky are incredibly knowledgeable by the way and it was nice of them to invite us.