The Virtual Production of The Mandalorian Season One

Industrial Light & Magic
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 2 months, 2020–2026
YouTube
2.5M views · 6 years ago · documentary · dated

An Industrial Light and Magic video on the virtual production of The Mandalorian season one. It explains how a curved wall of LED screens showing real-time rendered scenes, with camera tracking, replaced green screen on set.

HN people use it as the reference for how in-camera virtual backdrops with LED walls and a game engine work in practice.

“They track the camera position so they can move the image on the screen to match properly”
Visual storytelling & cinematographyShaders & real-time visuals
#virtualproduction#themandalorian#ledwall#unrealengine#ilm

16 comments from Hacker News

t
@thomasfl2020 · in “Giant LED screen replaces green screen on the Mandalorian”
Submitted the video to Hacker News.
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@tosh2020 · in “The Virtual Production of the Mandalorian”
Submitted the video to Hacker News.
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@aprdm2020 · in “The technology that enables Mandalorian”
Submitted the video to Hacker News.
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@UltraSane2026 · in “Director Gore Verbinski: Unreal Engine is the greatest slip backwards for movie”
I'm pretty sure this is false and the wall was visible in many scenes ▶ this video
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@doomlaser2023 · in “Moviemaking and gamemaking are converging”
It's an exciting time. Unreal Engine is being used to great effect in things like The Mandalorian: ▶ this video The latest developments in large language models are another area interesting to me personally as a developer. Since the beginning of the video game medium, limitations in programming game AI have left video games stuck in a corner, where they use violence as the primary means of driving immersion, simply because it's just too complicated to model human-like behavior outside the domain of simple carnival games. Some games try and brute force their way around this by explicitly picking from a set of predetermined branching paths at predetermined critical moments. But the latest AI tools, first seen in stuff like the GPT-3 powered AI Dungeon, reveal that there will soon be new methods of maintaining a coherent story in a simulated game. We won't have to always resort to violence and fancy carnival games for much longer.
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r
@russellbeattie2022 · in ““I believe CGI is getting worse even as the tech advances.””
The advances they've made in virtual production studio backdrops are amazing. Camera-linked floor-to-ceiling 180° LED screens and synced lighting is just amazing. The stuff they're able to do in The Mandalorian is incredible. Though once you know what to look for (the camo hiding the floor/wall seam) you can tell they're using it a bit too much. But still it's incredible. ▶ this video
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@e4e78a062022 · in “Francis Ford Coppola’s $100M Dollar Bet”
Not so sure about post-production rendering, if anything movies are moving to real-time rendered CGI environments [1]. Unreal/Epic have been a big player in this space. [1]: ▶ this video
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@codethief2021 · in “The Matrix Is Unreal”
> I walked away from this (um, got up from the sofa) thinking Epic’s gambit is to push Unreal Engine 5 as a virtual movie set I think they have been doing this for quite some time already: ▶ this video
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@acomjean2021 · in “How Marvel took over cinema and TV”
They apparently did a lot of the cgi in real time with an curved led wall and some version of unreal engine. They track the camera position so they can move the image on the screen to match properly and They only render high resolution what’s in the camera viewport and the other stuff just provides some nice realistic ambient light. ILM video: ▶ this video link
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T
@Twirrim2021 · in “BBC Sport's Tokyo Olympics studio [video]”
Take a look at how they filled the Mandalorian. Quite a lot of it was filmed inside a large video wall / cube. One of the big advantages for them was that it resulted in far more realistic lighting. ▶ this video
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@Laremere2021 · in “BBC Sport's Tokyo Olympics studio [video]”
If you think this stuff is neat, there's a neat improvement on this using what are essentially video walls. Replacing the greenscreen removes the problems with green or white, and gives presentors/actors better idea of their space. Tom Scott did a quiz series showing off the technology, linked to timestamps where he explains things: link link link link See also roughly the same technique being used in the Mandalorian TV show: ▶ this video
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@crooked-v2021 · in “How Technicolor created Ruby slippers without using color film”
This video has a lot of examples: ▶ this video Part of the idea is to do as much as possible in-camera, by rendering the virtual surroundings at a high enough quality to directly film them as the actors' backdrop. It's sort of like a wildly more advanced version of using matte painting backdrops. It also seems far better for actor immersion than green screen, as the people on camera get a live wraparound view of the virtual 'set'.
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