Virtual production showroom with Vanilla System
We partnered with Professional Show, a long-established Italian broadcast system integrator who supplies clients including Mediaset, Sky, Rai and most of the major Italian broadcasters. In their Milan showroom we installed an LED volume with Vanilla System.
The headline feature on the install is multiview. The setup lets you sync a broadcast control panel (in this install an ATEM, but the integration works with any video mixer with open APIs: Grass Valley, Ross, Sony) with the LED wall, so you can run a multi-camera production on the LED wall driven by a normal broadcast control panel. When you cut from camera to camera, the frustum on the LED wall (the slice of the wall the camera is framing) changes too: the old frustum disappears and the new one appears in the same beat. Vanilla System handles the switch, with everything tied to genlock (the reference timing signal that locks every device in the chain to the same frame edge).
To hold that switch precisely in sync we used an Evertz genlock generator, which gives independent control over each output and lets us shift its vertical phase, so the frustum switch lines up with the camera cut, with the LED wall refresh and with the camera shutter.
On top of that, in the showroom:
- Pre-release programmable lights with pixel-to-pixel control, used to project the 3D scene's lighting onto the real talent and objects on the stage. The fixtures are RGB-WW (RGB plus warm white plus cool white), so they reach a much higher TLCI (Television Lighting Consistency Index) than the LED wall on its own. An RGB-only LED wall doesn't cover the full Planck curve on the CIE chromaticity diagram, so on skin tones it falls short.
- RED Global Shutter cameras supplied by Panatronics Milano, so the chain runs without rolling-shutter issues. A global shutter sensor captures the whole frame at once, instead of scanning the image line by line.
- Frame remapping demonstrated in the showroom: the LED wall projects two different things at the same time, at different refresh frequencies, and each camera captures only the projection meant for it. An alternative to frustum switching for multi-camera work, where multiple frustums (one per camera) can sit on the same LED wall simultaneously.
