The Technology That's Replacing the Green Screen (vox.com) 46
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vox: As a compositor for venerable visual-effects house Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), [Charmaine Chan] has worked on films like The Last Jedi, assembling various digital elements into a beautiful, seamless image. Her job changed while working on The Mandalorian, one of the first shows to use ILM's upgrade for the green screen: LED panels that use the same technology as video game engines to place a realistic-looking world behind the actors.
The result was a huge improvement, as green screens actually have a lot of drawbacks. Removing the green screen is never as quick as VFX artists would hope, and it also casts green light over the set and the actors. Even green-screen substitutes, like projecting an image onto a screen behind the actor, fail to dynamically respond to camera movements the way they would in the real world. ILM's solution fixes a lot of those problems. It also led to creative breakthroughs in which the old Hollywood order of making a TV show or movie -- wherein VFX came last -- was suddenly reversed. Now, artists like Charmaine work alongside actors, set designers, and other crew members during filming. That collaboration means this technology doesn't just eliminate a screen -- it eliminates a creative barrier. Watch the video [here] to see how it happens.
The result was a huge improvement, as green screens actually have a lot of drawbacks. Removing the green screen is never as quick as VFX artists would hope, and it also casts green light over the set and the actors. Even green-screen substitutes, like projecting an image onto a screen behind the actor, fail to dynamically respond to camera movements the way they would in the real world. ILM's solution fixes a lot of those problems. It also led to creative breakthroughs in which the old Hollywood order of making a TV show or movie -- wherein VFX came last -- was suddenly reversed. Now, artists like Charmaine work alongside actors, set designers, and other crew members during filming. That collaboration means this technology doesn't just eliminate a screen -- it eliminates a creative barrier. Watch the video [here] to see how it happens.
CGA (Score:5, Funny)
The Color Graphics Adapter was what replaced my green screen in the 80ies.
But now get off my lawn.
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Amber screens replace green screens.
True story: I remember a friend who had a green screen monitor wired up to a VCR as his TV, and he invited us over to watch a movie. That was my first experience with Spinal Tap.
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And black and white screens replaced amber screens.
The first PC I had with both CGA and Hercules graphics came with an advanced for the time black and white screen. Not amber or even green - black and white, considered to be quite advanced for the time.
Of course, it occupied the strange area because color came out shortly thereafter, so everyone remembers the green and amber screens, but not many people remember black and white
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I don't think black and white was ever mainstream. Amber screens were still being sold until VGA killed them off. Black and white was really more of a special niche market. My dad's law office used CPT word processors--these were computers that only ran word processing software. The first ones used cassette tapes, but then they upgraded to 8" floppies on the new model (which could also boot CP/M). That one had a large portrait-shaped black-and-white screen designed to look like a sheet of paper. It wa
Historic trends. (Score:5, Insightful)
To all the people over the years who've supported gaming by buying hardware and software. Thank you. You've indirectly made all this possible.
I don't understand this method. (Score:1)
Instead of going to all this trouble, why can't they just shoot scenes on Tatooine?
Re: Historic trends. (Score:2)
To all the people over the years who've supported gaming by buying hardware and software. Thank you. You've indirectly made all this possible.
What did the consumer market for gaming do for this?
It's like saying thank you to all the people that bought cars over the years because they've indirectly made advancements in F1 technology possible. It's pretty much the other way around, there's already a ton of money at the top, and the technology trickles down to regular consumers. This sounds like a message from Ford/Nvidia marketing, only they can say "thank you for your money, because... F1/movies!"
There's always been a demand for high end computer
See the "making of" if you have Disney+ (Score:5, Informative)
Disney+ customers can watch The Mandalorian itself, but can also watch the short series of videos giving a peek behind the scenes. The fourth one, "Technology" [imdb.com], describes this technology.
"The Volume" as they call it is a real game-changer. When you are doing green screen, you need a lot of post-processing to add the effects, and it will never look perfect. With this technology, it looks perfect when it's shot. In particular, Jon Favreau said that you have to avoid shiny things when working with green screen because it's impossible to get the reflections to look perfect in post-processing; with The Volume, go ahead and have shiny things (like The Mandalorian's armor!) because the reflections are perfect, because the image is really there for them to reflect.
Carl Weathers said that it's an actor's job to play pretend, but it's still better when the actors don't have to. If there is nothing but green screen and there is supposed to be a lava river, maybe Carl Weathers need to point at something, but the other actors might not be looking in the same direction (they might be imagining something different). With The Volume, he can point at the thing, and all the actors are looking at the thing, because there really is an image of the thing. And maybe everyone is lit up a bit orange from the lava river. Everything is perfect and everyone agrees about everything.
This is a case where it was a lot of money up front, but it saves a huge amount of time while giving a better result. And time is money, so on the whole it's a net savings in money. I predict that we will see this technology in widespread use very soon.
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One of the interesting things about being in this environment as an actor would be that the images are rendered from the perspective of the *camera*, not from your own eyes, so it's got to be a little trippy if the camera is moving around. Still, it's probably better than a greenscreen, where there's simply nothing to see at all.
It actually wouldn't take much work to render the view from a person's eyes, though. That would be eerily close to a working holodeck.
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You could render the projection from an actor’s point of view... but only one person at a time, though. That’s what they did in ye olde VR “caves”, which is basically the
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Walk-in VR systems have been around for thirty years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
We tossed around the idea of building one in grad school, until the genetics institute just went and bought one.
Helping actors? That's a load of bullshit. (Score:1)
Same goes for helping technicians. Load of bullshit.
Actors are supposed to be able to ACT - regardless if the screen is LED, green or even if there is no screen or camera. Like on a stage.
It's like this ONE THING they train for, all their lives.
There's even a classic technique of acting as if one is standing in front of a green screen, developed centuries before there were cameras, let alone compositing. Pantomime.
This technology doesn't help the actors.
All it does is, it speeds up the process of layering C
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Actors are supposed to be able to ACT - regardless if the screen is LED, green or even if there is no screen or camera. Like on a stage.
Yeah! That Ian McKellan can't act for beans... [radiotimes.com]
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Ian McKellan wasn't complaining about his background. The problem wasn't the green screen it was that in order to shrink the hobbits he had to act as if he was delivering a monologue without an actor to act with.
Stage productions often have primitive backdrops but you also are usually actually looking someone else in the eye not by yourself on a second sound stage talking on the phone.
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As the other poster pointed out - this tech would not help McKellan. It's not a holodeck.
It's just a very expensive background which shifts weeks or months of work burden straight into on-camera time and onto backs of underpaid compositing workers.
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Umm... no.
It was bland cause the stages were small rooms, pretending to be huge awe-inspiring locations.
I.e. Actors couldn't act physically for fear of stepping out of the frame. Same goes for the cameras which were often just stationary or dollied around a very fixed stage.
Add to that director's tendency to film very stationary shots now that the tech allowed him to repeat what he did with back with THX-1138 and American Graffiti - filming with two cameras at once.
Only now he could do all that while sittin
Difference with pantomime (Score:2)
There's even a classic technique of acting as if one is standing in front of a green screen, developed centuries before there were cameras, let alone compositing. Pantomime.
The short way to see it is that in Pantomime, the artist is in control of the imaginary environment and he gets to decide how to act.
In green screen some 3D artist are in control of that environment months later. At best the actor gets a ping-pong ball to talk to.
The whole thing about Pantomime is that the actor has to act in the presence of an *imaginary* (is in: it will *always* be an imaginary) environment (imaginary protagonists or props or environment). They must convey this imagination *solely* throug
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I'm talking about pantomime as a basic technique taught in ANY acting school. And I do mean BASIC.
As for your arguments about how and why it doesn't pan out...
This does NOT create those imaginary objects OR ping-pong balls for actors to interact with.
Nor does it help with layering of "environment (imaginary protagonists or props or environment)" as you put it "a few months down the line".
This literally takes those months of work and forces the compositing techs to do it ON THE FLY.
Meanwhile, actors don't ge
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It's about as interesting as watching a video of a boardroom meeting, six people sitting around a table
I think that's a pretty fair criticism of at least half of the "making-of" episodes. I don't give a strong recommendation for the entire "making-of" series, just the one specifically about The Volume.
I did also enjoy the one about practical effects, and the one (I think the last one) where they talked about how they affordably got so many Imperial Stormtroopers for the final episode.
Pure genius: there is
Perspective (Score:2)
With The Volume, he can point at the thing, and all the actors are looking at the thing, because there really is an image of the thing.
Nope. Not all actor are seeing the same thing.
Because the whole thing is done with regular screens, which are "flat" and only show one perspective at a time.
All the screen will display a backdrop whose perspective is going to be correct from the point of view of the camera, not necessarily from the point of view of every single actor.
Think like all the "forced perspective" street arts - (graffiti which when looked from a certain point of view seem to not be flat) if you look them from a different point of v
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Nope. Not all actor are seeing the same thing.
I hate to break it to you, but current display technology is inherently 2D, so there is no way that two people are going to see different things. If there's a screen showing a door in the distance, all the actors will agree on where the door is. If they need to point at it, they will all point at the same spot.
It's true that the system is designed to make the scene look perfect to the camera, not any actor, so what the actors see might look distorted. But it'
Definitions. (Score:2)
I hate to break it to you, but current display technology is inherently 2D,
Yes, that's the whole point.
so there is no way that two people are going to see different things.
This sentence entirely depends on what you assume by using the word "things".
- The way you structure the rest of the paragraph, I suppose you mean "blobs of colours at specific position on the screen's surface".
Indeed, yes, all the people on the scene are going to see similar pixels on the screens.
- If you look at my post, I'm discussing about the perspective of the object. And using that definition yes, two people are going to see different things unless they are
Very cool (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a great technology. A simple description - is the same as the rear-projection technology that has been used for a century, but since it is a digital and a 3D environment, it can be keyed to the camera motion to react and give proper depth motion, as one might see using VR goggles.
One of the big problems they are having is blending the virtual environment with the real props / sand / rocks, etc. She mentioned that when the virtual environment produced a bright blue sky, it changed the hue of the real rocks, so they no longer matched the virtual ones. They had just a few minutes to fix that before shooting began.
Only temporary (Score:2)
Why blend the real with the virtual when you can just go all virtual?
Won't be long before the whole lot is virtual.
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Won't be long before the whole lot is virtual.
Unlikely. How will they interact with a virtual coffee cup? Or sit at a virtual desk? Or kick up virtual dirt? They can't.
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Virtual actors have no problem doing all those things.
Re: Very cool (Score:1)
You told us about this last year... (Score:3)
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Well, we slashdot folks are getting older, and our memories aren't so good any more.
The Veldt (Score:3)
It's here.
(If you don't know what that is, read a book [veddma.com] once in a while...)
So basically... (Score:2)
Nice advancement, but nothing revolutionary. I'm not even in the movies industry, but my friends and I talked about something like this back in the 80s,
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haven't watched the vid, are actors just surrounded by lcd panels? why does tfa call it led then? why do you bring up rear projection?
Star Wars wins (Score:2)
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We'll fix it in post (Score:2)
This technology is great for many reasons, but there are also some downsides.
The main downside is you have to take the building of all the assets that are going to be on screen, meaning everything from concept art, modeling, look development, lighting, possibly rigging, animation and simulation, all this time-consuming stuff that you could previously do in parallel to shooting becomes part of pre-production, and it becomes much harder to change things after the fact.
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... it becomes much harder to change things after the fact.
Hey if it stops George Lucas from mucking with his movies post-release, I’d say that’s a sacrifice worth making.
How its done. (Score:2)