Recreating Reality

Brompton Technology was launched, ten years ago, to address the LED processing needs of the live events space. But over the last few years the big growth area for us has been the use of LED screens as a replacement for green screen in virtual production. We are proud to have worked with some of the biggest names in film and television production and supported their amazing creativity.

Fundamentally, the challenge of virtual production is to create something that is entirely believable – where the viewer cannot tell whether it was shot in front of a real background or a virtual one. The clip below, created as a test by one of our partners, is wonderful demonstration of what is now possible. One of the images was shot on location and the other in a studio using a virtual background. Can you tell which one is which?

There are lots of elements to making a virtual background believable. For the LED processing it is about ensuring there are no visual artefacts that break the illusion and that the content is displayed as accurately as possible. We have learnt that when there is sufficient dynamic range to represent the scene realistically and the colours are as they should be, then the eye will believe it – and that is much more important than further increasing the resolution. In this, our unique Dynamic Calibration technology, which is the enabling technology for our implementation of HDR, is the key to maximising available dynamic range and colour accuracy at all brightness levels.

Over coming weeks we will be publishing a series of blogs looking in more detail at these key elements that go into recreating reality.