Robotic Seeder crane with Vanilla System
Warner Bros. Discovery wanted to automate the camera supports in their studio, where before they only had tripods. We proposed Seeder, a partner brand of ours, and installed one of their cranes.
The crane is tracked, with the tracking built into the rig, and it's fully motorised on the arm and on the head, with remote control over zoom, focus and iris on the lens.
The interesting part is the automation surface: operators can create sequences of camera moves, repeat them in loop, and chain them into timelines of motion. Everything is fed into Unreal through our Vanilla System nodes, where the virtual camera and the real camera (on Seeder) are synced on position, focus, zoom and iris.
What the rig does:
- Crane arm motorised, full position control.
- Head motorised on pan, tilt and lens.
- Position and lens data fed into Vanilla System, the virtual camera follows the real one in lockstep.
- Lens calibrated for distortion and nodal offset (the optical reference point of the lens), so the 3D background carries the same distortion the camera produces in real life.
The rig is now in regular use across their production days, with the automation surface giving the operators repeatable, frame-accurate moves on every show.