Lux Machina Consulting’s Post

Transcript

First time in the sawmill, boys. Let's rack them up and knock them down. I can say without a doubt this show would Masters of the Air would not have been as successful or maybe even possible without the Rialto getting into those tight spaces. And the ability for the Sony Venice to have the front end of it detached, have the camera bodies be attached somewhere separately and have the signal and the imaging ran back into the sensor I think is paramount to telling the story of the show if those old. Or two bombers, there's not a lot of room inside them and you can't necessarily fit a full length cinema camera in there. O the versatility of the Rialto meant that you get the power of the Venice in a small form factor. So being able to have this realtor, our camera head in various locations all around the plane while still being able to get that cinematic quality of the full size camera, It just meant they could be much more versatile and mobile on the day. The camera crew couldn't really safely get on the rig as it was. Moving around in between shots and it was several meters high up in the air. So we were tasked to create a system where the slate would actually appear on the LED wall O We used an iPad and basically put in all the stuff they put on the slate and then just toggle it on and off in between takes and do the slate at the start of the take. One of the things that Lux brings to the table is it's a ray of color science knowledge. We came up with a proprietary method that allows us to calibrate the color of the LED walls. It's a fairly unique approach and it means that I can trust the process. And I think that is really what good color science gets you. It gets you trust. So we'll get in there ahead of time. We'll make sure that everything's calibrated. This doesn't stop the DP from creatively doing what they want to do this merely. Puts it into a space where they're gonna get the best data possible off of the LED volume that you can, and that enables us to work much more smoothly on set. There were a lot of tools that we made both build and lux for mass of the air. Unreal Engine gives us such a precise way of changing things and one of the biggest changes we had to do was change lighting on set and that went for real life lights as well as our virtual ones. The light cards pretty self-explanatory. It was just a simple 2D plane in the virtual world that you could change the color intensity in a lot of different other values and that would just change the lighting on set. Very quickly and the other was a Flack spawner basically, as you can probably tell, there's a lot of explosions going on in the sky and so we needed a very quick and easy way to spawn explosions as a particle effect on the screen. We added toggle switches simply to the Unreal Engines native coding system operators. Click a single button and it will start spawning these explosions. A lot of the tools were very iterative. As soon as someone wanted a new feature to them we'll just add them then and there and then they could get going again and. Speed up the process of changing things a lot quicker. Over the many years that Lux has been around, we've honed in on our hardware. Every part of our custom Lux Arca boxes was very specifically chosen because they work well together. They are fast enough, they don't compete with each other for resources. So we spent a lot of time defining and putting this Arca service together so that you can get the best possible performance out there. Lux Arca was the backbone of Masters of the Year virtual production. We deployed almost 100 machines, and the beauty of Arca is that you can drop it in, you can deploy it, and you can pull it back out and it goes on to the next show. It's a repeatable, reputable, resilient product that actually can deliver and has proven to deliver what needs to happen in virtual production. Almost all the departments had to flow through our systems in one way or another. So if you talk about camera department, we had all the cameras coming in and then we redistributed that signal throughout the set to everybody who needed it. And it's very important that it comes to us because we have to genlock all of the frames together so that you don't get offset on the screen. It's not a simple setup. It's lots of computers, render engines and video signals going from A to B. On this particular project, we're working on multiple stages. At the same time, with a centralized server room, and this is actually quite unique, most systems aren't set up to run this many cameras at the same time. There was a lot of cooling cables and checking buttons and checking dials and checking screens to make sure things are running smoothly. Lux has always risen to a challenge, and one of the things I think was the biggest challenge of this show was not only the need for two very large volumes, but two large volumes to run concurrently. So when you're on set, you always want to be ahead of the game. You wanna make sure you're ready for what's coming up next. So what, We actually had an AMB cluster in our render system, so while they were shooting something, we could be on the B system with another operator programming the next scene. When they're ready to go, we can switch and then we're in the new environment. On the screens and essentially that was quite unique about our set. We were ready for what's next. And it's really important, obviously, to have as many of those kind of variables set as possible when you're going into a shoot day. And this is really what kind of sets teams aside is being able to be that flexible, adaptive in those high pressure situations to make sure that when those kind of curveballs do materialize, that the team is is well placed to be able to kind of respond to those in a, you know, in a kind of efficient manner. All these things have to come together harmoniously and it requires a thousands of line items. Technology pieces working together synchronously to create something that doesn't get in the way of what production is.