"The Mandalorian" to iQiyi's "The Rise of the Bad Well", virtual production into the film and television circle

Recently, a number of LED manufacturers announced the increase in the XR virtual production market. On March 17, Zhou Ming Technology Announced that It TDC Studio, the largest XR virtual production stage in Australia and even the Southern Hemisphere, has been created for technical direction company technology direction company in Australia. Alto Electronics has also announced a strategic partnership with indian film production and broadcasting companies to provide RM2 for its newly invested virtual studio. 3LED displays to create a seamless large immersive digital world.

Regarding the XR virtual shooting related market, relevant data show that the global XR film and television shooting related market size will be 3.2 billion US dollars in 2021.

Behind the gradual rise of the LED screen market is the rise of new video production methods driven by virtual shooting. I believe that friends who watched the opening and closing ceremonies of the Winter Olympic Games still remember that when the big snowflakes rise from the ground and countless small snowflakes gather, they seem to be in the ice and snow world.

The Winter Olympics were able to achieve this visual effect through XR virtual production technology, motion capture, and multiple huge LED displays. This method can meet the design imagination of the creative team to a greater extent, and is being widely used in content such as stage performances.

In fact, this more advanced and efficient production method has been adopted by some video content producers since last year, typically iQiyi.

Laying the foundation for "Next Generation Entertainment"

iQIYI's use of virtual production technology and LED screens belongs to the leading level in China, both in terms of starting time and proficiency.

In March last year, iQIYI held the world's first film-and-television LED realistic virtual production XR live concert "Virtual City", allowing THE9 to "shuttle" in different scenes such as cities, forests, and sphinxes. There were more than 15 scene shifts throughout the concert, and each song had a backdrop that matched its theme, making the show look more like a Hollywood blockbuster.

In order to bring a more immersive feeling to the audience, iQIYI uses two sets of realistic XR and stylized XR solutions, and sets up multiple virtual machine bits to render different perspectives. The background of the concert is rendered to the LED screen in real time. Whenever the camera position changes, the picture on the LED screen needs to calculate the new position in real time, and all this happens in the live broadcast, which is undoubtedly more technically challenging and also shows the strength of iQIYI's virtual production technology.

It can be said that this concert greatly released the imagination of the creative team, making the imagined scenes of the past become a reality, thus creating the prototype of "next-generation entertainment" for the audience. In June 2021, iQIYI held another Adventure 3VR glasses XR online product launch. Subsequently, iQiyi applied this technology to film and television production.

In November 2021, iQIYI conducted a high-precision digital scan of the "Bad Well" set in the popular self-made drama "Wind Rises in Luoyang", and used the scanning model as a scene to shoot the first 4K film-and-television virtual production sample in China, "The Rise of the Bad Well". Subsequently, iQiyi also produced the 4K MV "Heart" of virtual idol Xiao Jasmine in the virtual "Bad Well". This is also the first time that a producer in China has run through the complete production process of "real scene scanning - asset reconstruction - virtual shooting - refined storage - multi-service reuse".

From these two examples, it can be seen that iQIYI has reached a fairly skilled point for virtual production based on LED screens, and this can bring far more than just the improvement of visual effects for iQIYI.

Unleash your imagination and build digital assets

For many years, the film industry has been emphasizing "film and television industrialization", and if you want to truly achieve this, you can't do without the use of smart tools and the optimization of production processes. Virtual production, on the other hand, is a technology that can kill two birds with one stone.

In the past, film and television shooting often used a green screen background, but this method relied heavily on the actor's "brain supplement", which may reduce the quality of performance. After using the LED screen, the shooting team can interact with the LED screen in the built 3D environment, the actors can interact with the virtual scene, and the performance can be more natural, so as to achieve the most ideal effect in the director's mind.

In addition, the addition of LED screens can also greatly improve production efficiency. When shooting with a green screen, the production team spent a lot of time doing fine keying while patching up color spillage. After using the LED screen, the shooting team can edit and correct the playback content in real time, and can also import pictures, models and other materials at any time to achieve rapid scene switching.

Finally, this method allows the director to see more accurate light, color and other picture effects in real time at the shooting site, which can not only create a richer scene according to the director's requirements, but also greatly reduce the post-production workload and greatly improve the production efficiency of the film. It is understood that the filming and post-production work of the explosive American drama "Mandalorian" in the past two years was completed on the set, which is undoubtedly revolutionary for the film and television industry.

At the same time, iQiyi is also promoting the landing of "digital assets".

In the filming of "Wind Rises in Luoyang", in order to create a "bad well", iQiyi used a studio covering an area of nearly 5,000 square meters, which was built by hundreds of people in 65 days. According to the traditional production process, this expensive scene will be abandoned after the filming is completed, which will undoubtedly cause a lot of waste of resources. iQIYI, on the other hand, has turned the original "one-off" set into a permanent, reusable digital asset by performing high-precision laser 3D scanning of the scene.

In iQIYI's strategy, a very important idea is to "eat more than one fish". The so-called "one fish to eat more" refers to the transformation of IP through literature, comics, games, film and television and other forms, forming brand value and user scale, and promoting the value of market segments in all aspects of the industrial chain.

Taking the "Luoyang" IP as an example, in addition to film and television, iQIYI also plans to launch various forms of derivative content such as games, animations, documentaries, VR full-sense movies, stage plays, and cloud performances around it. Through virtual production technology, digital assets such as "bad wells" can be used in a variety of content.

Imagine this: if a Lord of the Rings-themed game were to be released in the future, players could swim and fight in the same modo, shire, Gondor, and the Valley of the Helmets that are exactly like in the movie, how attractive would this be for the audience of the Lord of the Rings movies and novels? In this way, through the reuse of digital assets, more value of IP is what iQIYI is doing.

iQIYI's virtual production and digital asset strategy also paved the way for the possible era of "meta-universe". Perhaps we cannot yet say what the meta-universe is, or even to conclude that it must be the future. But at least we can be sure that the metaverse may bring about a virtual world with a strong sense of substitution. Now, every time iQiyi completes a virtual production, it can do technology accumulation for the meta-universe era; every digital asset it builds may also become a pavilion in the meta-universe era.