Journalist Ian Failes looks into the different types of virtual production on offer today, asking several players in the virtual production space, including MPC, about their approaches to this growing area of filmmaking.

“The turning point for MPC was The Jungle Book,” notes MPC Realtime Software Architect Francesco Giordana. “That’s when we realized how important virtual production is and we embarked on this new adventure. Tracking all the assets, the scenes, the cameras, the animations and all of the modifications is key. We couldn’t find any available third-party solution that could give us that out of the box.

“The typical way of maintaining the look and feel of a physical camera in virtual production is to motion capture a Steadi-cam and have a cameraman operate it, but we went a lot further,” says Giordana. “We encoded a variety of traditional camera equipment like cranes, fluid heads, dolly tracks and more, and made sure they would feel to the camera crew exactly the same as the real thing.”

Find out more about virtual production here.