By Thomas Walker, Product Manager
28th January, 2021
What are the benefits of Studio Mode in the context of Virtual Production?
LED panels have a certain brightness range that is configured at the manufacturer’s factory. For instance, in its original setting, a panel might support a brightness range from 0 Nits right up to a peak luminance of 2,000 Nits. There is a fixed amount of binary precision used to control this output brightness, based on the LED driver chips used in the panel, and this is configured to match the panel’s overall achievable brightness range. The amount of precision that a given panel design is capable of is often referred to as the bit depth.
In a virtual studio environment, however, panels are rarely used at their full brightness. This means that if a panel is never going to be used above 1,000 Nits, the bit depth from 1,000 to 2,000 Nits is wasted.
Our Studio Mode feature provides an answer to this by reducing a panel’s maximum brightness, for example from 2,000 to 1,000 Nits, whilst maintaining the PWM (pulse width modulation) bit depth, resulting in improved image quality when running at low brightness
In Virtual Production environments, the benefits of using Studio Mode are particularly prominent on especially bright panels running at relatively low PWM bit depth (14 bit or below). With Studio Mode activated and coupled with our Dark Magic feature this goes even further to enable the best possible low brightness performance.
To activate Studio Mode, no panel recalibration is necessary, but Field Application Engineers have to implement the mode manually. Whilst the function is not applicable to all LED panels, for those that support it, Studio Mode is just a simple check box on the processor itself. To find out which panels are supported and how you can reap the benefits of this feature in your Virtual Production project, please contact Brompton Support at support@bromptontech.com.
