Instructor: Paul Hanrahan and Richard Muller
Price: See details below.
Registration: Email Paul Hanrahan directly to reserve your place.
This is a special one-time modular training course for cinematographers, DITs, colorists, producers, and directors.
This course is for film professionals who need to find economical ways to leverage the power of virtual studio shooting, with specific focus on simplifying setups and budget friendly approaches that make sense in the South African market. From existing virtual studios, to pop-up studios and custom builds using LED wall sections.
We explain the inherent problems with photographing an LED wall, and detail some of the current solutions. We will equip you with the knowledge about the various hardware and software stages in a virtual studio and detail best practices to optimize the process. This will include hands on experience and practical examples.
We will focus mainly on using 2D footage on the LED wall. Some pointers for live 3D rendered footage from Unreal Engine will be given, but as this requires a higher budget and is less frequent, it won’t be the main focus of the course.
The course will be held at Mushroom Media in Cape Town, and lunch will be included. Participants will receive ICA certificates.
The course will be broken into 4 modules that can be enrolled for separately.
Module 1: Technical Shooting Guidelines and Preparation
Duration: 3 hours (9 Sept. 2025, 9am to 12pm)
Cost: R3000
Details of the full process of planning, testing, shooting, recording metadata for 2D plates. From story board, to pre-vis, to shoot. We will advise on lens and camera movement choices, shooting resolution and then matching and alignment of plates and live action in the virtual studio. This module is most suitable for cinematographers, directors and DIT’s, all other departments welcome too.
Module 2: 2D Plate Preparation, Color Management and Playback
Duration: 3 hours (9 Sept. 2025, 1pm to 4pm)
Cost: R3000
Color management and grading of 2D plate footage and encoding for wall playback. Deciding whether SDR and HDR wall payback is more suitable. This module is most suitable for colorists and DIT’s, all other departments welcome too.
Module 3: LED Wall Pipeline Calibration and Creative Adjustments.
Duration: 6 hours (10 Sept. 2025, 9am to 4pm)
Cost: R6000
This will include an overview of the lighting and color management challenges in virtual studio production. We will go through various options for calibrating camera and wall from most simple to complex:
- Manual calibration
- Arri’s calibration tool
- Sony’s calibration tool
- OpenVPcal, Colorspace and others.
We will also discuss more complex creative adjustments using mixed color temperature and other factors.
This module is most suitable for DIT’s, cinematographers and colorists, all other departments welcome too.
Module 4: Production Case Studies
Duration: 3 hours (11 Sept. 2025, 9am to 12pm)
Cost: R3000
Looking at when to choose virtual production over green screen or soft-drop setups. This will include various case studies and summarize factors that most affect cost and efficiency when evaluating the use of virtual studio. We will discuss content most suited to virtual studios, planning and pre-production considerations and advise on custom setups.
This module is most suitable for producers, directors and cinematographers, all other departments welcome too.