What are the group’s view on Virtual Production? Could this genuinely be the end for alot of jobs in our industry over the next few years?
I think the only people who should be worried are the ones who spend most of their time doing shitty car comps. And speaking as somebody who’s had to do my share of shitty car comps, I say Hallelujah!
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Its hard to say how it’ll all play out. I think the biggest obstacle at present is the need to have all of your VFX/designs/etc sorted before shooting. That is theoretically very easy, but like tornadoes assembling 747s, it doesn’t seem to happen all that often.
My hunch is it’ll gain some inroads, get some blowback for the difficulty in changing designs after shooting, and settle into a useful part of the process.
As for the job-ending issue, that’s always happening. The sentient mountains of money that own the big VFX shops are always trying to get rid of our jobs. For now that’s being accomplished by sending work to countries with drastically lower labor rates, and soon enough those folks will be losing out to machine learning. At least with Virtual Production, some of the work needs to be local and involve humans.
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I think it’s likely to make big inroads in the Episodic & Film world, less so in commercials. Seems like the investment in digital assets and virtual production gives much bigger payback if you’re making 9 hours of TV or a 90 minute movie rather than a 60 secs TV spot.
I’m sure there are things that need fixing in post after the fact as well.
Haven’t had the chance to work on anything shot this way yet, but looking forward to doing so.
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Until there’s a “ML Convert Art Director Brain into ProRes” plugin, I’m doing just fine.
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seriously. I used to think my skill was “creativity” but now I know it’s “converting what is in other people’s minds into video”
It feels like the new stereo. I’m beyond tired of all the Unreal spam over on facebook. Congrats, you put an HDR on a turbosquid car model!
Grumpiness aside, I also agree with @AndyBrown. I don’t see the commercials world getting its act together enough to create all the CG assets before the shoot, but think it could be a big help for narrative production, if for no other reason than being able to shoot magic hour 24/7.
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Magic Hour 24-7 should be the name of one of the shops that does this.
72 and Sunny should open Magic Hour 24/7
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It’ll bring in more Flame jobs, with the except of car-comps, as mentioned earlier.
IMHO, I’ve yet to be on a show where client/creative has made a strict decision on something that is being executed in any kind of a digital capacity (virtual production, LED panels, …concept design)- can’t tell you how many instances I’ve heard about where $$$$$$$$ is spent on fixing the backgrounds for virtual productions because they wanted something different.
I don’t think it’ll affect us in a negative way.
I don’t fear VP as well.
As said by others, 24-7-Magic-Hour and/or TV Shows or features take advantages from it.
There’re some commercials using VP already in Germany. But IMHO from what I saw that’s not as good as this sci-fi thing with that guy who never put down his brushed metal helmet (even there, I’m wondering how much post was still needed afterwards…?)
But even then, there’ll still be the creatives who change their mind after editorial.
I think, that we will take adavantage from all those motion capture informations, if they are recorded properly. So probably match moving won’t be that dealbreaker any more. But roto will rise and shine 
I haven’t gotten specifics on what post was done on Mandalorian, but I know of people who were doing post on it, and it sounded like a fair amount of shots needed help.
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I have done a few jobs with it, and yes we ended up fixing and replacing most of it. Its nice to have the dynamic lighting though , that looks nice, the rest was a pain.
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