For those who don’t know the tool: Assimilate is best known for Scratch, its colour grading and finishing system used in professional post pipelines for more than twenty years. Building on that experience, the company developed Live FX, a software-only real-time media server for virtual production. Live FX sits alongside Live Looks for live grading and Live Assist for multicam VTR and Play Pro Studio as the only professional Video Player you’ll ever need. Together, these tools cover on-set backup & offload, colour, capture, playback, and now LED stage control, completing a loop from wall to camera to grade.

Why Live FX Was Created

When virtual production started creeping into film workflows, nobody had actually built a media server for film sets. Crews borrowed tools from the live-event world or bent game engines like Unreal into shape. It worked, technically. It also meant a lot of compromises, hacks, and explaining to cinematographers why things behaved like stage tech.

Live FX was explicitly built to stop that nonsense. It is a software-only system designed for film production, not for programmers or touring engineers. Live compositing, projection mapping, and image-based lighting all live in one interface that makes sense to people who think in shots and lighting setups. There are no artificial limits on video outputs or DMX universes. It stays lean, runs fast, uses hardware efficiently, and scales cleanly from a single machine to multi-node setups. Playback, lighting, and metadata all reside in the same environment rather than being duct-taped together.

Take a driving plate shoot for a car commercial. Live FX can drive 360-degree plates across a curved LED volume, control real lighting fixtures based on what is happening in the image, and stay locked to camera tracking and lens metadata. As the virtual sun in the plate moves or shifts colour, the physical lights on set follow along in real time. The result is a much closer-to-final image before anyone even opens a compositing tool.

The best part is that Live FX does not demand a rack of servers or exotic hardware. With small or midsize LED volumes, it runs comfortably on a normal workstation. Think MacBook, think gaming PC. That makes LED workflows accessible to smaller studios without turning the hardware budget into a horror story.

Completing the Assimilate Ecosystem

Live FX also neatly finishes what Assimilate has been building for the past two decades. The company already knows a thing or two about media pipelines, and while Scratch covers real-time colour work and solid format playback. Live Looks brings grading onto the set. Live Assist handles multicam VTR duties. All familiar territory.

With Live FX in the mix, the ecosystem finally extends into projection mapping, camera tracking integration, and lighting control. In other words, the bits you need for LED volumes and still very much need for classic green screen stages. Crucially, Live FX keeps metadata intact. Lens data, focus, exposure, tracking information, scene, take, timecode – all of it can be captured on set and passed straight down the line into postproduction. No extra logging, no manual copy-paste rituals, and far fewer opportunities to lose something important between shoot and post.

Why It Is Different from Unreal

Live FX is fundamentally different from running an instance of Unreal Engine. Unreal is a full game engine that requires significant system resources, whereas Live FX is designed as a creative tool for cinematographers, DITs, DPs and VFX artists. It emphasises rapid real-time operation with a user interface tailored to film workflows rather than code.

Live FX supports workflows such as 360° plates and 2.5D compositing with ease. It can also import 3D environments like Notch Blocks or USD scenes. Notch Blocks are prebuilt, real-time graphics or effects authored in the Notch motion graphics tool and used here to add dynamic or procedural visual elements directly to LED walls without taxing the system as heavily as a full engine build. (If you have a look around the Notch site, you’ll spot Live FX in many of their demonstrations)

At its core, Live FX is one machine that can drive LED walls, control lights, composite live plates, and manage colour, all in a single, unified software environment.

The Software Side

The Live FX interface is built on immediate visual feedback. It is a GPU-powered environment that can load, layer, grade, and project footage onto LED walls, green screens, or 360° domes. It supports the projection of 2D, 2.5D, 180° and 360° content beyond 16K resolution in a variety of modes, including frustum, planar, spherical, dome or cylindrical output.

For 3D content, Live FX can import USD scenes and Notch Blocks. It also supports Netflix OpenVPCal, an open-source LED wall calibration tool developed for in-camera visual effects workflows. OpenVPCal creates colour space corrections tailored to the camera and LED pipeline to improve image accuracy across walls.

Live FX does not limit scene size or plate resolution; the hardware instead determines those constraints. Modern GPUs commonly support textures up to 32K by 32K, and Live FX can theoretically handle playback up to 65K by 65K at over 1,000 frames per second. However, real-world limits are set by machine capability.

Compositing

Real-time compositing includes built-in qualifiers:Live FX ships with RGB, Chroma, Luma, HSV and Vector keyers that can be combined in any way thinkable. It supports OFX plug-ins and Matchbox Shaders, the latter being small GPU-based shading programs developed initially for Autodesk Flame, adapted here for custom, real-time visual effects.

Inline colour grading tools include wheels, curves, masks, and LUT management, enabling DITs and Creative Artists to see accurate grades on set. Camera and metadata integration allows Live FX to read detailed information, such as lens, focus, and exposure, from SDI feeds from manufacturers including ARRI, Sony, Canon, and Panasonic. It supports all major camera trakcing systems, such as Mo-Sys, Zeiss, Vicon, OptiTrack and others, but also generic protocols like FreeD, Open Track IO or Open Sound Control protocols.

Inside Igelkott Studios: Pioneering Projection-Based ICVFX with Live FX

Playback in Live FX supports nearly any frame rate or aspect ratio the GPU can manage. It can record raw feeds and metadata while outputting a live composite and automatically rebuild the final online version after the shoot. Storage requirements vary by format; high-resolution codecs such as NotchLC or OpenEXR sequences demand high-speed, high-capacity storage, while lighter formats accommodate portable SSDs. Live FX can also capture and output via NDI for streaming to platforms such as YouTube through tools like OBS.

Live FX does not natively run interactive simulations or complex particle systems, but it integrates with engines such as Unreal, Blender or Unity. In these hybrid workflows, Live FX passes timecode and tracking data to the engine and receives the rendered output back, making it suitable as a composer in mixed real-time pipelines.

Scaling the Stage

A single Live FX Studio system can control up to seven LED processors from two GPUs, or up to eight LED processors through two 8K-capable SDI cards – provided no other hardware bottleneck limits the playback. For larger volumes, a multi-node configuration becomes necessary. In such setups, multiple Live FX systems split the rendering and control responsibilities across the volume, with each system driving part of the wall.

Multi-node workflows also help clarify roles on set. Typically the guy taking care of the lights, is a different guy from the one taking care of the LED volume and you don’t want the two to fight over who gets to use mouse and keyboard. So setting up a separate client Live FX system to take care of lighting might be a good choice. 

Hardware and Platform Requirements

One of Live FX’s core strengths is that it does not require datacentre level hardware. A modern workstation or laptop with a contemporary GPU is sufficient for smaller and medium setups. For larger stages, a Windows workstation with a high-end Nvidia Quadro card is advisable. You can run Live FX on really any machine, as long as the operating system is Windows or macOS. You can even reuse existing mediaserver hardware. The main question is, whether that hardware is up to the task its supposed to fulfill – the software does not impose any limitations.

CPU requirements are modest; any processor from the last five years that handles video rendering comfortably will work. Minimum RAM is 8GB, recommendations start at 32 GB with 64 GB or more for heavier workloads. If Unreal runs on the same machine, memory usage scales with that workload. Supported operating systems are Windows 10 or later and macOS 10.15 or later. Optional SDI I/O can be added via cards from AJA, Blackmagic Design or Bluefish444.

Existing media server hardware can often be repurposed for Live FX if it meets these requirements. The software itself does not impose restrictions; performance depends on hardware suitability. Even a compact Mac Mini can handle basic LED playback for smaller LED stages .

Connectivity: Walls and Lights

Live FX interfaces directly with LED processors, such as those from Brompton and Megapixel VR, to manage genlock, timecode, and perspective correction. It outputs Art-Net, sACN or USB DMX to lighting fixtures and is the only tool right now that supports video-based fixtures like Kino Flo Mimiks, wihch do not use DMX. (A short glossary of those formats at the bottom)

In image-based lighting mode, each fixture can respond to what is playing on the screen – or content that is supposed to appear off the screen in front, above, or next to the talent on stage (think 360° content, where only a portion of the entire 360 degrees is actually shown on the LED wall and the other content can be used for image-based lighting to simulate the environment!). If the plate shows an intense directional light from the left, the physical lights respond accordingly, making stage illumination react to LED content in real time.

Live FX integrates with lighting consoles, enabling gaffers to control physical fixtures or their virtual equivalents. Because Live FX handles pixel mapping internally, lighting desks only need to control up to 51 DMX channels per fixture, regardless of how many channels the physical fixture uses. This helps reduce network complexity and preserve universes on the lighting console.

A webinterface?

A built-in web interface allows remote control of fixtures from a tablet or phone, which is convenient for on-set adjustments. Using real stage lighting to complement LED walls provides brightness and full-spectrum illumination that LED panels alone often cannot deliver. Many LED walls remain based on RGB emitters that exhibit spectral gaps, particularly problematic for accurate skin tones. Stage lights with full-spectrum sources help close those gaps, producing more realistic imagery. Although newer LED tiles that incorporate warm and cool white emitters improve colour response, adoption in studios remains limited, due to cost.

Setup and Onboarding

It is claimed that a Live FX setup can be completed before your coffee gets cold. Installation, licensing and launch are straightforward. Connect the LED processors and lighting interfaces, load the background plates or environments, import LUTs or colour profiles such as ACES, Rec.2020 or HDR10, and begin playback. Lighting synchronises automatically.

Learning resources include the Assimilate YouTube channel,
demo scenes for green screen and LED wall workflows from sim-plates.com,
the Live FX User Guide,
and the Assimilate Discord server.

To learn Live FX, Assimilate offers dedicated training, which should be booked for at least 2 days. Alternatively, their free Assimilate Academy Masterclass might come to a town near you. But even without training, Live FX can be learnt fast and efficiently via the YouTube channel. Tutorials and dedicated playlist for almost any subject exist and allow new users to get up & running really quickly. While it is preferred that users get acquainted with the software beforehand, the reality is that Live FX is often deployed a day before the shoot, but even in those scenarios, new users can get a usable image onto the wall within minutes after installing the software.

But does it work?

How Live FX Is Changing The Face Of Virtual Production

Although a very young tool, Live FX has been used on major Netflix shows and feature films. Unfortunately, a lot of the details cannot yet be disclosed, but here is a very select list of the latest case studies:

• LiveFX on “Secrets we Keep” https://digitalmedianet.com/behind-the-scenes-of-the-netflix-hit-secrets-we-keep-a-virtual-production-deep-dive/
• Live FX for “Biffy Clyro” https://digitalmedianet.com/interview-with-russ-shaw-daniel-walker-on-the-making-of-biffy-clyros-goodbye-video/
• Live FX on “Ballad for a Small Player”: https://digitalmedianet.com/behind-the-scenes-visual-effects-for-ballad-of-a-small-player/

What’s new in the latest release and what’s next?

Just before Christmas, Assimilate released Live FX 9.9, which introduced true multi-node workflows, along with multi-GPU-output options, an updated Stage Manager, new Unreal nDisplay workflow, and various smaller updates to the IBL toolset, projection modes and format support. But Assimilate is already working on the next batch of features: REST API and native ST2110 support are coming up later this year.

Live FX 9.9: More Walls, More Nodes, More Fun

Compatibility, Technical Specs and Pricing

Live FX supports Windows 10 or newer and macOS 10.15 or newer. It scales from laptops to full LED control rigs. Typical configurations can hold multiple 4K feeds or a single 16K background plate. Supported file types include EXR, ProRes, NotchLC, HAP, RAW, H.264, H.265, LUTs (.cube and .3dl), CDL, Notch Blocks and USD. External I/O includes SDI, NDI, Spout, Syphon, OSC, DMX, Art-Net and sACN.

Camera metadata and colour data flow directly through the Assimilate ecosystem. Metadata including user annotations, scene and take information and all camera tracking and SDI-metadata can be recorded and passed along to postproduction. Integration with Unreal, Blender and Unity workflows can happen via GPU texture sharing or NDI/SDI. Licensing is available in multiple options: monthly ($695), 3-month ($1,595), annual ($4,995) and permanent ($7,495, including one year of support and updates). Annual support for permanent licences can be renewed at any time. And before everything, get the free trial / learning edition here.

Why It Matters

Live FX functions as the set’s nervous system, coordinating LED walls, lighting, compositing and colour with post-grade precision and real-time responsiveness. It brings film production language and workflows onto the stage, reducing guesswork and providing artistic control at the source. After twenty years of Scratch being called the Swiss army knife of postproduction, Live FX may take that title for virtual production.

As always, professionals should test thoroughly before deploying on live shoots, and you can do this easily with the free personal learning edition here. Register and drop us a line that Digital Production sent you. Assimilate will set you up :).

Appendix: Protocols, Extensions, Standards and Definitions

FreeD A tracking data protocol developed for camera tracking systems to transmit pose, lens and other metadata in real time.

Open Track IO An open and free metadata protocol designed by the SMPTE RiS-OSVP group for virtual production tracking interoperability. ris-pub.smpte.org

Open Sound Control (OSC) A network protocol for communication among computers and multimedia devices, widely used in creative and show control environments. Wikipedia

Art-Net An Ethernet protocol specification for transporting DMX universes over UDP/IP, used for lighting control in entertainment networks. Beckhoff Automation

sACN (Streaming Architecture for Control Networks) – A protocol (ANSI E1.31) for sending DMX data over UDP/IP networks, designed for multicasting lighting control. Beckhoff Automation

OpenVPCal An open-source calibration tool for LED wall and camera pipelines developed by Netflix, used to generate colour space corrections. GitHub

Notch Blocks Prebuilt, real-time content building blocks created in the Notch motion graphics tool for procedural visuals. Notch Blocks

Matchbox Shaders Small, GPU-based shader programs originally developed for real-time effects in Autodesk Flame, used here for Live FX real-time effects.

USD (Universal Scene Description) A file format and interchange framework for 3D scene descriptions, widely adopted for complex pipeline interoperability. But as Digital Production readers you should know about all this. Why are you reading this? Get the LiveFX-Trial!

RTMP (Real Time Messaging Protocol) A protocol for streaming audio, video and data over the internet.

P.S.: Yes, the headline is a wink at one of the funniest moments in Mel Brooks’ High Anxiety. We’ll just leave this here.

The post Assimilate Live FX: The VP-Stages’ very, VERY nervous system. first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Mazze Aderhold.

When Chaos Labs first showed off Chaos Arena and Chaos Vantage together, the pitch sounded almost heretical: a real-time virtual production suite that skips game engines entirely. To some, that sounded impossible. To others, overdue. We spoke with Chris Nichols, Director of Chaos Labs, about what it means to go “engine-free,” why USD and MaterialX matter when the lights go up, and how Gaussian splats actually behave outside a SIGGRAPH paper. *¹

DP: Chris,before we jump into the tech: Chaos Arena and Chaos Vantage together are pitched as a virtual production suite without the usual game engine baggage. How would you describe the idea behind this approach in your own words?

Chris Nichols: One of the biggest issues with virtual production is rendering. There are options that have existed for a while, including working with game engines, but they require you to move to an entirely different platform, use an entirely different ecosystem, and switch to an entirely different pipeline. What we’re doing is focusing on the rendering part in a way that lets you keep your current ecosystem and pipeline. 

Using Chaos Vantage and Chaos Arena simplifies the entire process. You can basically just take what you already do and work with real-time content. You don’t need to bring in additional experts or learn new systems, you just do what you’ve always been doing and take it a step further. 

DP: Arena and Vantage now support USD, MaterialX, and even Gaussian Splats. Could you walk us through why these formats are important?

Chris Nichols: A lot of times, people are forced into using a specific system or format that puts them in a walled garden. It makes them take additional steps, which just slows everything down. We’re trying to break out of that by adopting open source formats and making things as easy as possible, and the visual effects companies that have begun to accept and support USD and MaterialX have an advantage. With USD and MaterialX, no matter what tools they are using – Blender, Maya, Houdini, 3ds Max, etc. – they are directly compatible with Chaos Vantage and Chaos Arena without needing to convert anything. 

With gaussian splats, that’s just a general demand that people want. It also works really well with some of the things we specialize in, especially ray tracing, and it allows us to utilize them more than just a 3D point cloud. 

DP: One of the bold claims is that you can work without pre-processing, no baking, no data wrangling. From a technical standpoint, how are you pulling that off?

Chris Nichols: This is a very interesting question. If you’re looking at game engines, which use rasterized rendering, that does need pre-processing, and you do need baking and data wrangling. But if you skip rasterization and go full ray tracing, none of those things are necessary. So they are essentially two separate things that seem similar, but are not. It’s kind of like asking how many miles per gallon an electric car gets, which is an understandable question given that we’ve been thinking in those terms for years, but it’s really two different technologies that work differently. 

With rasterized rendering, pixels are free. No matter what the resolution you’re working in, the render times are not affected that much, but adding more polygons slows it down. With ray tracing, polygons are free. So no matter how much geometry you throw at the system your rendering isn’t affected all that much. Alternatively, when you start adding more pixels you need more rays, which slows things down. 

What has really changed that allows us to bring it all together is recent technological breakthroughs. That includes AI, which lets us denoise and upscale our renderings at very, very high quality, using something called “ray reconstruction,” which was first introduced in DLSS 3.5 and has since been improved. Ray reconstruction allows us to produce very good renders using smaller resolution bases with fewer rays, while keeping the speed. Add in AI and you can get clean, high resolution results with far fewer rays cast, and significantly fewer pixels. AI fills in the gaps. 

With ray tracing, there is no baking. That’s the point. We don’t have to pre-render the lighting, it’s full global illumination in real time. Move lights and move objects, all the lighting follows in real time, no rebaking. There’s also no need for data wrangling, because we can just throw the maximum geometry at everything all the time. We don’t need to create levels of detail, we don’t need to do anything else. We can just say the final asset is in real time and enable that, which basically means one asset for everything across the board. 

DP: If I’m an artist walking onto a stage with Arena and Vantage for the first time, what does the workflow look like from setup to shooting?

Chris Nichols: It’s actually very straightforward. Vantage itself is a simple program. You can just load your asset into Chaos Vantage as either a .vrscene file or as a USD with a MaterialX system. We also support OBJ and a couple other formats, but those are the most common.

Navigating around is then very straightforward, like most 3D applications. Chaos Vantage is not trying to be a game engine, and it’s not trying to add all kinds of complicated systems. It’s just meant for real-time visualization. So you put your cameras down, move your lights, and move your objects along with a couple of other things. Arena manages multiple instances of Vantage and enables them to operate simultaneously, synchronizing multiple render nodes across a large LED wall. Essentially, it’s saying “here is a master Vantage scene, here’s all the slave nodes that are working in the background.” Arena makes sure everything is synchronized and rendering together. 

Arena also adds the camera tracking system you are already using, and we support multiple camera tracking systems. We just enable the protocols. It could be OptiTrack, stYpe, Mo-Sys, or any of those systems, and it enables where the camera is looking. It’s very straightforward and there’s not much of a learning curve. It’s essentially a viewport. This makes it much easier for people to adapt to the system. 

That means that a Maya user can easily jump into Arena within a half an hour or less. Same with a Houdini user, a Blender user, or any of those types of tools. Those are the types of artists we are specifically targeting, giving them the ability to continue in the real-time world. That also includes people like directors of photography, because it operates like how a real camera operates. It’s the same language they would use. 

DP: Virtual production workflows often involve deciding what to solve in real time and what to leave for post. How does your toolkit support that balance?

Chris Nichols: In the past, there’s always been this break between what you need for offline rendering, and what you need for real-time rendering. It’s two different pipelines, two different teams, sometimes two different companies doing completely different things. We’re looking to make one system that can cross many departments and many avenues simultaneously. We want to offer the same asset that can be used from previs to virtual production to post-production, and make it as seamless as possible. With USD and MaterialX, you are free to use the same asset across the whole production cycle, no matter what DCC, what renderer, and what pipeline you use. It’s your pipeline, and your choice.

The transition from virtual production to visual effects to post-production should be as seamless as possible. That’s one thing that we feel that we support very well. The best example of that is the asset we used for the short film we created to announce Arena, Ray Tracing FTW. You can watch it here in full:

That was just one massive asset that had the entire town. That included the interior of the bank, five kilometers of train tracks, the tunnel, the bridge, every blade of grass… everything. In total, the asset contained around 2.8 trillion triangles, and the whole asset was generated in a matter of days. We used it for everything, then we’d take that same asset and use it for post-production, because we still had all the detail that we originally had from the beginning. That’s how you save a lot of money. So basically, why build it three times when you can build it once?

DP: You tested Arena extensively on the short film Ray Tracing FTW. What were some surprises?

Chris Nichols: Our assistant director on Ray Tracing FTW was Ben Hansford, a well-established commercial director that has experience with virtual production. He told us to plan for an hour to an hour and a half of crashes every day, because that’s what’s expected when traditionally working with virtual production. We ended up completing the shoot in three days without a single crash.

In fact, I don’t know of any crashes that have ever happened on set with Arena, at least nothing that was not recoverable in a matter of a few minutes. We didn’t expect it to be as stable as it was, especially in those early days when it was barely a product and the shoot partly meant to be a test for it. 

DP: Real-time changes on set are often the stress test for virtual production. How did Arena and Vantage handle that during Ray Tracing FTW?

Chris Nichols: We aren’t doing any baking or anything like that, so real-time changes are trivial to us. That’s exactly the way it should be. Rasterized rendering can look very photoreal, but you have to do a lot to make it look like that, and some of the things you have to do to make it look photoreal involve not being able to edit it later. For us, if you’re just ray tracing the whole time, none of those things matter. 

DP: Vantage has always been about pure ray tracing in real time. How does Arena extend that, and what does the combination unlock that wasn’t possible before?

Chris Nichols: When you’re done ray tracing, you’re done. You don’t have to solve any of the other problems, so you massively simplify your process. If you go back to 2006 when VFX started to adapt full ray tracing – not just the hybrid ray tracing that most game engines use – teams were still trying to rasterize things, but they started to realize they could simplify the process. They didn’t need to have things like full teams of shader writers, instead they could use ray tracing and that essentially solved the problem. It made things much, much faster and more efficient. 

The same philosophy is true here when we’re doing real-time ray tracing. It gives us a big advantage, and it’s not just in the quality of how things look, it’s how fast you can make something look good, and how easy it is to get there. So you’re actually saving a ton of money by ray tracing. 

In terms of what new technology has made all of this possible, when the 2080 graphics cards came out in 2018, it was the first time ray tracing cores were enabled on NVIDIA cards, and that let us design around that technology. But we weren’t able to achieve that super high level of quality resolution needed for virtual production until DLSS 3.5 came out. More recently, AI has made a lot of things possible. The best way to think about it is one out of every eight pixels is real, the rest are AI generated.

DP: For artists who are used to Unreal Engine or Unity, what’s the biggest mental shift when moving into an Arena/Vantage-based workflow?

Chris Nichols:  Unreal and Unity are fantastic tools for making games, and essentially what they’ve done for virtual production is to try to gamify the film making process. Game engines turn everything into a game control system, which can work to some extent, but it completely deviates from the other systems that the movie industry has been using for a long time, especially visual effects. What we’re doing is we’re making it easier to streamline that process across all departments. 

For people that have been using game engines, Arena is much simpler and you’re not sacrificing anything to get there. There are a lot of tricks and processes that you need to know for a game engine, and that’s just the way it has been. With Arena, we’ve had people ask if we can recreate a unique process they’ve been doing, but we don’t need to implement their workarounds. So their very clever tricks are completely unnecessary in the way that we do things.

DP: Gaussian Splats are hot right now. How do they behave inside Arena and Vantage compared to the hype we see in research papers?

Chris Nichols: Gaussian splats seem like they are here to stay, plus they are simple enough that it was relatively easy to support them compared to other standards in the past. The technology is also fairly familiar, and builds on the older light field technology that we experimented with years ago, first with companies like Lytro, then Google. Gaussian splats are essentially a representation of color and light from multiple different angles that change based on the angle you are viewing it, which is similar to what a light field does.

The problem with light fields is that it involves massive amounts of data, and lots of redundancy to get it there. So much so that they were impractical to use. But if you use neural fields to represent all the redundancy, it changes things. That’s basically what neural radiance fields, or NeRFs do, they are essentially light fields with a neural network. It’s a really cool system, but still very cumbersome. 

So when gaussian splats came along, it solved a lot of issues. All we really need is a point in space and a shape on that point – typically a disc or an ellipsoid – that changes colors depending on the viewing angle. It’s such a simple idea that began as a concept and grew from there. And because they’re so lightweight, because they do so well, it just became so easy for us. 

The benefit that we get from gaussian splats, and the way that we’re approaching it by actually ray tracing it – as opposed to rasterizing it – is that we can put 3D objects inside of a gaussian splat and they will ray trace that gaussian splat directly. The best example I can give is that you can take a gaussian splat of a city, and then you put a CG car on a street within the city. Then when the car travels through the city it will accurately reflect the environment within the gaussian spalt. If you did it as an HDR, every light point is at infinity, and that’s not how it really should be.

DP: From a director’s or DoP’s point of view, what kind of creative control does this system provide on set?

Chris Nichols: Everything that a DP would do manually, we can offer virtually. You can move lights, you can change colors, you can do all kinds of things. You can manipulate all of those different areas as well. We’re actually in the process of working on getting a DMX control for what we’re doing, so the digital gaffers can work together in terms of all the lighting controls you would have.

Another thing that we’re working on for the future is a new way of doing depth of field so that we can control the ability to figure out the distance between the camera and the wall, and add the appropriate compensated depth of field postwall. When the camera and wall defocuses are combined, it is the correct level that you would need for your set. 

DP: Are there particular hardware setups that Arena and Vantage thrive on, or can it scale from laptops to full LED stages?

Chris Nichols: Most LED stages I’ve worked on have, at a minimum, an A6000 card, if not two, and that’s perfectly reasonable for most setups. That’s one of the practical advantages of Arena – it can be installed on an existing LED wall in a matter of a few hours, without changing any hardware. In fact, we do that all the time. 

Another benefit of using this type of setup is that Chaos Vantage is a standalone app that can be installed on any laptop running an NVIDIA card. So a virtual production supervisor, a VFX supervisor, or even a director can open the scene and look through the 3D environment on their laptop.

DP: What role does MaterialX play in enabling consistency across tools, especially when moving assets between DCCs and Arena?

Chris Nichols: When someone uses Arena, they may work on an asset that ends up going to several different visual effects studios, each of which has their own pipeline and tools. Some might be using V-Ray, some might use Mantra, some might be using Arnold, and on and on. We want to make sure all of those studios can continue to use the same asset without any compatibility issues. And for shaders to translate, the best thing we can do is support MaterialX. As long as a studio supports MaterialX, they can use the same asset as everyone else without issue. 

DP: If you look at the ideal future workflow, what would be the hand-off between on-set capture with Arena and finishing in post with Vantage or other Chaos tools?

Chris Nichols: Really, it’s just a matter of being able to use the same asset. You can have an asset at a post-production house, then hand it off to a virtual production studio and keep doing what you’re doing. The asset might receive some changes along the way, but when you get it back, it’s essentially the same asset. 

When we were working on Ray Tracing FTW, there’s a scene in a Spanish hacienda. We were busy getting everything ready, so we didn’t have time to build one ourselves. We just went to Evermotion and bought one for around $100, and within 10 minutes it was on screen. It just worked. There are a ton of great assets out there that are Arena ready, and you can find comprehensive libraries filled with virtual production-ready assets from sites like Turbosquid, Evermotion, and KitBash3D to name a few. Hopefully, future workflows will keep things easy. We’re not trying to overcomplicate things. Just use one asset and use it across everything.

DP: Finally, what’s next for Chaos Labs in this space?

Chris Nichols: With Chaos Labs, each project builds on the success of the last, and each new experiment opens the door for the next. For our film Ray Tracing FTW, we wanted to know if Arena could work as a virtual production tool, and it did, because we could see how easy it was to go from one asset to the next. Right now, we’re building on that and testing to see how we can improve the complete filmmaking workflow, from the earliest stages of development to the final pixel, all using a single asset that will be developed throughout the lifecycle of a film. 

One of our focuses with Chaos Labs right now is on creating a previs system for Vantage that enables camera tracking on a bluescreen environment. Using the same asset for previs, we can then translate it for virtual production for in-camera VFX, and then go on to be used for final production. So we’re really looking at the full lifecycle. 

DP: What would be your recommendations for people getting into it?

Chris Nichols: Arena is designed to be easy. It’s virtual production made simple. You don’t need to learn any complicated new techniques or workarounds, you just use what you already know. Your pipeline, your choice. Load the free trial and give it a whirl!

DP: What good resources are out there to learn more about it?

Chris Nichols: There’s a lot of great documentation out there. We make it a point to offer as many tips and documents as possible. There are also tutorials and things like CG Garage. I recently recorded an episode specifically about this. 

DP: What is the next project you are working on ?

Chris Nichols: There is a feature film in development that we are using as a major case study for Chaos Labs, designed to showcase how this can all work. We feel strongly that Arena and Vantage will debunk the idea that virtual production is only for big, expensive movies. It’s a tool that can be used for everything, even low budget independent films. They can have the same power and process as a major production, at a much lower cost. That’s what we’re trying to do within Chaos Labs. We want to show people that you can do your $5 million movie with virtual production and get the same results as films with huge budgets.

1. Editorial Comment: Did Chaos Lab want their name in every sentence? No. But we find it funny to have a highly technical topic, talking to a top-shelf expert, and almost every sentence has the word “Chaos” in it? Yes, because I am somehow still cursed with the humor of a 5-year-old. ↩︎

The post Keep Your Pipeline: Chaos on Skipping the Game Engine first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

ARRI is packaging LED-production into a complete, installable studio system. The company’s new turnkey stage integrates LED walls, ALEXA 35, lighting, audio, server infrastructure, and monitoring into a pre-planned bundle. The idea is simple: production teams get predictable, repeatable results without having to assemble a patchwork of components. And together with Samsungs “The Wall” and the Realtime Department, you get everything in one tight package. But let’s look further.

The offering grew out of a familiar problem. High-quality LED workflows are more complex than they appear. Fragmented solutions risk mismatched colour, camera artefacts, or unstable pipelines. The answer is to deliver planning, consulting, and tested system design as one product, reducing the risk of incompatibility.

ARRI and Samsung will present the turnkey LED studio at IBC 2025 (Amsterdam, RAI, Hall 2, 2.B08), where visitors can join interactive demos, explore new content concepts, and experience virtual production workflows live on site. André Rittner will be available at the Samsung booth to discuss all things at the stage!

DP: André, how did ARRI first get involved in building turnkey virtual production stage?

André Rittner: ARRI first became involved in building turnkey virtual production stages when it became clear that achieving high-quality results requires more than just installing an LED wall. While virtual production and AI-generated content may appear simple, the underlying workflows are highly complex. To produce reliable, output, the interplay between hardware, software, colour science, and camera systems must be perfectly aligned.

The risk of investing in fragmented or incompatible solutions is considerable. This is why ARRI developed a turnkey approach, combining consulting, planning, and tested system design. The Corporate LED Bundle was created to streamline setup and reduce operational complexity and costs, together with our partners Samsung and Realtime Department.

The concept can be compared to driving a car: the user benefits from the performance without having to design the engine. ARRI integrates all relevant components into a complete system, delivering predictable results in a repeatable process.

Our initial focus was on simplified studio environments for corporate and communication productions, where advanced functions such as real-time tracking were not essential. At the same time, the architecture remains modular, so that clients can scale the system into a fully equipped Virtual 3D Studio when and if required.

DP: The ALEXA 35 is the standard camera for the Turnkey Stage. Why was this model chosen over others in the ARRI lineup?

André Rittner: A more accessible ALEXA 35 Base model is available, and it offers accurate colour management just as the Premium. This is essential for high-quality production, as LED panels operate using RGB light, and our eyes can immediately detect the difference between RGB and natural daylight in a direct comparison.

When this difference is noticeable, it often gives the impression that something is off, making the product or content appear less professional. Any ARRI camera can be integrated; the only crucial factor is ensuring that the camera is calibrated to match the LED colour values.

DP: What’s actually included in the ARRI box?

André Rittner: The idea of a “box” is quite literal, although in practice it refers to the customer’s own space where everything is installed. Much like a car that can be customized, this “box” can be tailored to individual requirements. The standard configuration includes an LED wall (approx. 2.70m x 4.80m), a camera, lighting, a server system for playback and colour management, audio equipment, a control monitor, a recording device, and all necessary accessories.

The centrepiece is the server, which functions as a self-contained control hub. It allows users to automate workflows or manage multiple processes at the push of a button. From this foundation, the system can be scaled or expanded to virtually any size. But that is something Realtime Department will tell you all about! (Story upcoming)

DP: Is a viewfinder part of the standard package, or is everything controlled remotely?

André Rittner: Yes, a camera viewfinder is included. It’s important that all components remain usable for traditional production as well.

The unique advantage of this solution is that the server software can also control the camera and lighting. Unlike consumer devices, film cameras require precise operation. And the server enables that precision while making independent or even single-person operation possible. For example, it helps eliminate issues such as moiré.

DP: Let’s talk about audio: How is sound handled within the Turnkey Stage setup? 

André Rittner: Audio recording is also managed via the server, supported by dedicated hardware. In a studio environment, direct sound and microphones play a crucial role. Directional room microphones reduce the need for complex cabling and manual leveling. At the same time, professionals retain full control and flexibility, while the system also supports simplified, semi-automated operation.

DP: What’s the setup process like for a user? Is it truly plug-and-play, or will I need a crash course in ARRI engineering before getting started?

André Rittner: It’s not a Lego kit that can be assembled ad hoc. Proper installation and integration into a space is done by system integrators. During commissioning, the system is explained and workflows can be demonstrated. Users who invest in such a studio usually already have film experience and understand the complexity involved.

Our solution ensures interaction between components and makes operations as simple as possible. For straightforward use cases, processes can be reduced to one-touch operation. For more demanding productions, however, a team will still be required. The system is therefore both professional-grade and flexible, enabling in-house productions such as commercials or even entire film sequences.

DP: Calibration is never a one-and-done deal—displays drift over time. Is periodic recalibration necessary?

André Rittner: Calibration can be carried out independently or even automated, with minimal effort required. And while it’s true that LED panels age, their expected lifespan is typically 8 to 12 years.

André Rittner: The system is not proprietary or closed. Users can freely adjust configurations and adapt to future requirements. This openness is key for long-term flexibility.

DP: What storage options are included in the system? Does the package come with Codex, SSDs, or any other dedicated media, or is that up to the end user? What export formats are supported?

André Rittner: The system includes a Codex card as standard, but that can be customized, including all camera and color settings. Recording can be done directly in-camera or via an external recorder. Supported formats include 12G-SDI ProRes 4444, DNx, and H.264 in SD/HD, among others. Export options can also be adapted to customer requirements.

DP: How do external triggers work in this setup—can I control lighting, playback, camera, or stage cues via standard protocols (DMX, MIDI, OSC, etc.), and how open is the system for custom integrations?

André Rittner: Yes. Since the server software was developed with flexibility in mind by a German partner Realtime Department, virtually any protocol or integration is possible. This interoperability is a major advantage of the tightly integrated camera, lighting, and LED system. The goal was to provide a software backbone that adapts to customer workflows rather than forcing a fixed structure.

DP: How many people can comfortably work or perform inside the Turnkey Stage? Is it strictly “one-man-band,” or is there space for a team or ensemble?

André Rittner: With the right planning, the stage can support solo operation or full team productions – the configuration is entirely customer-driven. During the planning phase, the LED and studio size can be designed to fit the production needs. Once installed, the setup is less flexible, as LED cabinets age in place. For this reason, proper consultation is crucial, both to maximize the investment and to avoid unnecessary costs.

DP: Looking back: What were the most challenging trade-offs between simplicity for new users and flexibility for pros? Any tough calls or “wish we could have done it sooner” moments?

André Rittner: A very good question. Our philosophy is to start with the smallest viable package. With the exception of the LED wall, everything can be flexibly expanded as needed. Tracking, for example, is powerful but can quickly require 1–5 operators per setup. That shifts the workflow closer to high-end film productions. Anything is possible …

DP: What’s your favorite hidden trick, hack, or pro tip for getting the most out of the Turnkey Stage?

André Rittner: Don’t overthink it, just start using the system. Most users are impressed by the quality and creative potential, which naturally drives inspiration and creativity. The key is to stay hands-on and let the technology spark both creativity and new ways of working.

The post ARRI Packs Virtual Production Into a Box first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

by Peter Beck, Field Product Manager Workstations
and Rugged at Dell Technologies in Germany.

This new approach to filmmaking has revolutionized the industry by blending digital technologies with traditional techniques. It merges virtual environments with live-action filming, allowing studios to project ultra-high-resolution backgrounds onto LED walls where actors can perform in real time. Camera tracking allows virtual backgrounds to react to camera movements in real time, making the scenery appear fully realistic. Studios can simulate buildings or landscapes that exist in the real world, as well as completely fictional worlds such as imaginary planets or fantasy cities. Studios can replicate real-world locations, such as buildings or landscapes, or create entirely fictional worlds, from alien planets to fantastical cities.

The benefits of virtual production are extensive. Post-production work is often reduced, and overall costs are lower since crews no longer need to travel to global locations like New York, Paris, or London to shoot on site. This also helps reduce CO₂ emissions, which is a clear environmental advantage. Directors and film crews can adapt virtual environments quickly, make last-minute changes, and experiment visually without being tied to external factors.

Freed from concerns like weather, natural light, or time-of-day constraints, teams gain greater control over planning and execution. Virtual environments are also far easier to reuse than physical sets. This facilitates so-called pickups, i.e. additional or supplementary shots that are recorded after the main shoot to improve, supplement, or correct certain aspects of a scene. But even the next sequel to a successful blockbuster series can be produced much faster and more efficiently.

Workstations as a Central Component

Software tools like Blender and Unreal Engine make virtual production possible. Artists often use Blender to design photorealistic 3D models and animations, while Unreal Engine renders these assets on LED walls and enables real-time interaction between actors and digital content. For these tools to operate effectively, they require equally capable hardware. This is where workstations come in, especially those outfitted with high-performance GPUs. These machines are the backbone of the virtual production process.

Workstations render the digital environments live and display them on LED walls. They also handle compositing, the process of blending actors and physical elements with the virtual background. These workstations allow directors, cinematographers, producers, and department heads to hold virtual scouts; collaborative sessions in a shared digital environment used for pre-production planning. By interacting in real time within the virtual assets, teams can explore camera angles, lighting setups, and set design long before principal photography begins.

One reason workstations are so effective is that they harness the specific strengths of modern GPUs. While CPUs generally produce higher-quality final renders, GPUs are much faster at generating real-time previews. This performance difference stems from their underlying architecture. CPUs are designed for complex, sequential tasks and typically include a few very powerful cores. GPUs, by contrast, excel at parallel processing and are equipped with thousands of smaller cores that can handle many simple calculations simultaneously. This enables rapid on-set rendering during virtual production. More detailed work, such as final colour grading or complex simulations, can then be completed during post-production using CPU-intensive data centres.

Dell Precision 7875 Tower Workstation: Purpose-built for Virtual Production

The Dell Precision 7875 Tower Workstation (SpecSheet) is a standout hardware solution for real-time rendering. Designed specifically for professional use in virtual production, it supports up to two NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada GPUs. This graphics card delivers extremely high computing power for real-time rendering. Its architecture includes RT cores that accelerate ray tracing and Tensor cores that specialize in AI calculations. It also has a large graphics memory. This combination enables complex 3D scenes with numerous details and high-resolution textures to be displayed smoothly without delays. With this level of hardware, filmmakers can make creative decisions in real time and integrate highly realistic virtual sets directly into their production workflows.

The post Workstations for Virtual Production first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Advertorial.