Virtual Production For Broadcast: After The Gold Rush - VP Gets Sensible
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From back-projection to multimillion-dollar LED volumes, in-camera VFX has always rewarded the same discipline: matching technique to the task. After years of enthusiastic adoption on both produced and live content, virtual production is delivering on its promise. Not through spectacle, but through pragmatism.
Often, the only really reliable way to evaluate new ideas is in retrospect. Virtual production has now been a mainstream technique for long enough to give us at least the beginning of that long view – and in those few years, it has already started to become clear how the process can work best in various situations. At the same time, the popular impression of in-camera VFX in general has perhaps drifted a little way from the places where it brings the most value.
On The Shoulders Of Giants
In-camera visual effects in general – ICVFX – had a good start in life. Back- and front-projection were, for a long time, the only way of doing certain things, and in the best case, the results were spectacular. Much of Cameron’s back-projected work on Aliens holds up to this day, and the reflective interiors of Oblivion, done with front projection, would have been a nightmare on green screen. The things which make virtual production so valuable now are the same things which always made ICVFX work. Cameron took care to use interactive lighting, reflections, smoke, and handheld camera movement, exploiting what the technique could do and hiding its sins.
Perhaps the biggest problem with any form of projected image is that the screen is necessarily white and loses contrast quickly if other light is allowed to fall on it. LED video walls are, by default black – but video wall panels good enough for what we now think of as virtual production are a comparatively recent innovation. By the 2010s, they were already being used to cast moving patterns of light into the scene. The canonical example is Gravity, but it had already been used in Tron: Legacy, and was becoming mainstream by the time reflections were cast on cars for Logan.
The sheer output of the panels was high, but they lacked the resolution to behave as an in-camera backdrop (at least at reasonable scales) until the end of that decade.
Then, several things happened, all at once.
First, those experiments made it clear what might soon be possible. Second, LED panel manufacturers were clearly keen to sell panels into a market that might take large quantities of their best-performing models. Third, real-time 3D rendering was coming of age, having enjoyed the vast R&D spend of video gaming for long enough that the images were becoming sufficiently convincing to be useful. Finally, the option to tie all of that together with camera and lens tracking was becoming more accessible. Beyond the technology, though, were two other big considerations.
Both Show & Business
One was creative: audiences were becoming exquisitely sensitive to, and critical of, green screens and other obvious caveats of shooting for significant post-production VFX. An expert might contend that those problems are not inevitable, being a symptom of poor VFX direction more than a fundamental problem with the underlying techniques. Either way, ICVFX could take the curse off at least some of them.
The other was financial: the couple of years pre-pandemic captured the greatest enthusiasm for streaming media – what we might call peak Netflix. Production spends were sufficient to support the kind of rates an upscale virtual production stage might attract, and the ambition of those productions was enough to justify that spend. There is even some suggestion that the circumstances of the pandemic had an influence: at least one virtual production studio was built on technologies integrated by the founder in his garage during lockdown.
And then there was The Mandalorian, which was a well-liked part of a well-liked franchise which looked great and famously used the technique. There’s nothing quite like a famous new technique achieving conspicuous creative success on a financially successful project.
The Correction
In several major drama production hubs, the huge optimism of 2019 and 2022-23 has significantly abated. The causes and implications of that are well beyond the scope of this article, though we can safely assume that the white hot enthusiasm of a few years ago is unlikely to return. Nobody has yet gone out of business and at least two incumbent streamers are each insulated from market conditions by their connections to staggeringly cash-rich motherships. Even so, the truth remains: the type of production most likely to use virtual production is probably the one most negatively affected.
At the very least, that reality might have caused some other considerations to snap into focus – particularly issues around sheer cost. The popular imagination often sees a top-class virtual production facility as a stage-filling video wall cove. Some of the most spectacular, built at the peak, were seventy-five feet wide and fifty deep. LED panel prices have dropped by almost half in the last few years, but even now, such a facility might cost $5m to set up just in hardware, demanding day rates well into five figures. These facilities are beautiful and capable of wonderful things, but they were built during a gold rush, and it quickly became apparent that the number of ultra-high-end stages and the number of productions which could realistically afford to occupy them was not economically compatible.
Overprovision and consolidation are not new patterns in any emergent business, although the business structure of some facilities can be a little opaque. There is speculation that hardware manufacturers, representing the lion’s share of costs, have been involved financially, effectively discounting LED panels for a stake. Either way, some of those large stages have been broken down into two smaller ones, or perhaps one smaller stage and a system designed to pack into a truck. One particular improvement in both electronics and mechanical rigging has been the increasing practicality of short-term portable setups.
Even so, one of the most overlooked considerations of virtual production is setup time, especially for facilities which see a new crew with a new set of camera equipment twice weekly. The most capable kinds of ICVFX rely not only on the video wall, but also a stack of technologies high enough that it occasionally becomes a teetering pile. The camera must be tracked, the lens or lenses characterized and encoded, and the tracking data integrated with the 3D rendering system. The display and lighting must be synchronized and color-matched to satisfy the taking camera.
Pre-Production Requirements
The largest pre-production imposition, of course, is creating that spectacular 3D environment. Whether that’s a live sports reporting studio or an alien planet, an environment must be modelled, textured and lit, perhaps with the integration of image-based lighting. In extremis, motion platforms and set pieces might be matched to behavior in the virtual world.
Modern productions are far less used to this sort of pre-production requirement. When Cameron shot people fleeing the crashing dropship for Aliens, a parallel model unit was working on another stage to create the background footage. It is a cliche, perhaps, to suggest that modern productions might throw in a green screen and resolve to figure out what replaces it in post. Even so, when CG gradually replaced model effects, it moved the workload from pre-production to post production. ICVFX moves it back before the shoot again, and the cast-iron deadline of a shooting day has never before been imposed on this work, in this sort of way.
Even so, in 2026, the number of productions actually undertaking a full, custom, from-scratch 3D environment build is relatively small. Costs and lead time are often dissuasive; much of the custom modelling which goes on is done to service entire seasons of sports broadcasting. In drama, simple 2D background footage is much more common, whether captured for the production or from one of the world’s increasingly-comprehensive libraries, shot with one of the world’s ever-improving multi-camera arrays.
The engineering challenge is nontrivial, and under all the same time pressure as any other shooting day.
What Virtual Production Actually Is
One crucial realization is that not every situation actually demands every technology which has ever been used in ICVFX. A lot of modern work actually uses prerecorded background plates, even plates hired from a library, leveraging the LED video wall as a software-defined background with enough punch to provide some interactive lighting.
If this sounds familiar, that may be because the single, predominant killer app of ICVFX for drama is driving scenes. Taking a filming vehicle through any of the world’s major cities is often a stop-go experience with much more stop than go. Crew, directors and actors have all responded with enthusiasm (actually, with cheering and thunderous applause) to the huge amounts of time and money saved. Some have reported shooting an entire TV season’s worth of car interiors material in a few days.
That turns ICVFX from a flighty new thoroughbred into a mainstream tool.
In the end, changes are semantic. Exactly what we might call virtual production has become part of a huge range of ICVFX techniques. What really matters, though, is that the industry seems to have worked out which techniques work best in which situations – which productions need an advanced, camera-tracked virtual world, and which can work wonders with a slightly better version of an LCD TV outside the car window. That simplification saves time and money in a way that early virtual production sometimes didn’t and now very much does. If this sounds like a coming of age for virtual production, that might be the right way to think about it.
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