Hello, I'm adhering to the hardware requirements outlined in this documentation. However, most sync generators I've found support a maximum refresh rate of 60 Hz, and I haven't come across any that exceed this limit.

My understanding is that if a sync generator is limited to 60 Hz, it would cap the display output at 60 frames per second (fps). For our interactive real-time gallery, we require a higher refresh rate (>= 120 hz) to ensure smooth visuals.

Seeking Advice:

1. Sync Generators Supporting Higher Refresh Rates: Could you recommend any sync generators that support refresh rates above 60 Hz?
2. Reliance on NVIDIA Quadro Sync II: Is it feasible to forego an external sync generator and rely solely on the NVIDIA Quadro Sync II for synchronization needs?

Any assistance or recommendations would be greatly appreciated!

Quick disclaimer: building LED walls is a very expensive and sometimes overwhelming process, so the goal here is to help demystify it. Doing it right will help prevent and minimize expensive repairs down the line, so use a pro if you’re not feeling up to it.

And for context, our team at CoPilot has designed and integrated custom LED volumes for Fortune 500 companies and studios around the world. Again, not a sales pitch, just some added context. Happy reading!

The Groundwork

Before getting started with your build, you need to figure out your wall size & specifications, your mounting, and your electrical setup. LED volumes are large, often permanent structures, so making sure you properly plan for building them is key.

1: Choose the size of your LED wall/volume

The most important factor to consider when choosing your volume size is the types of projects you’d like to shoot. For example, if you’ll only be shooting interviews, you won’t need an 80 ft diameter volume. On the other hand, if you’ll be filming multiple cars, you’ll probably need a wall larger than 20 ft in diameter. Otherwise, you run the risk of running out of wall space and limiting your camera movements.

If you anticipate shooting multiple different kinds of projects, we find that semicircle volumes with a diameter between 30 feet to 50 feet provide the most versatility.

The next factor to consider when choosing your volume size is the size of your space. Obviously, you can’t put a huge LED volume in a small room, but you’ll also need to factor in the space that your camera, lights, processors, and other equipment will need.

The size of your shooting space will also impact the LED tile specifications you choose, such as pixel pitch. A smaller space means your camera will have to be closer to your volume, so you may opt for LED tiles with a smaller pixel pitch to prevent moire.

2: Choose your mounting.

Now that you know how large your volume will be, you can choose how you’ll mount it.

Ground support is the standard option, but may require more space. Generally, you should reserve about three to four feet behind your volume to make sure there is space for the support rigging, and ample room to safely service your tiles.

Another common option is ceiling mounting. As with any hanging structure, you’ll have to consider any load bearing beams in your space. It also requires certified rigging points, so if your space isn’t equipped for that and it isn’t within your budget, you may need to look at other rigging options.

Generally, the most cost-efficient option is ground support, but certain cases may call for other mounting options. For example, many organizations with the proper rigging points opt for ceiling mounting because it can actually help minimize the seam (the gap between the volume and the floor).

Additionally, LED walls over 16ft in height will usually require ceiling or additional wall support to ensure stability. However, vendors like ROE have recently released LED products that are capable of standing freely at heights over 16ft with just ground support.

3: Figure out your electrical setup.

It comes as no surprise that your space needs to have enough power to run an LED wall. The amount of power you’ll need will depend entirely on the size of your wall, the amount of LED tiles that make up the wall, and the LED tiles you choose to use in general (as some generate a higher output than others.)

With every LED tile, there will be a maximum power output AND an average power output. Maximum assumes you’re powering the volume at 100% brightness (or nits in LED terminology), and average assumes the general brightness to be around 50%. A common misconception is “the brighter the wall, the better the LED looks” – while this may be true for advertising or display LEDs, in XR virtual production LED walls are often operated at a brightness level of 10-20%.

All that being said, when you’re factoring the amount of power you need for your LED wall, it’s better to be safe than sorry – we like to assume 5-6 LED tiles per designated 20 amp breaker. This gives you plenty of extra power to stop you from accidentally tripping a breaker. Your LED integrator will give you the option to order power cables that go directly from the LED wall to a standard electrical outlet, or go with another option like a distribution box.

A distribution box (also known as “distro box”) is a portable device that safely distributes electricity from a power source to other devices, which essentially acts as its own electrical box by breaking down the power of your LED wall into something digestible. This is a great option if your LED wall consists of 100-150+ LED tiles.

If you don’t already have enough power, you may need to install multiple outlets or rework your electrical panel all together. Since you're likely building a permanent structure, you want to make sure the outlets or power you install are behind the LED wall and are spaced out accordingly and adhere to your local building guidelines and codes. If you have more questions about what power requirements your specific LED tile might have, you can also find power requirement calculators online.

The Build

For the sake of simplicity, let’s look at how a 20 ft volume would be built with ground support.

1: Build and level your mount supports

You need something to stack tiles on. When building your mount support, it’s imperative that you have a straight, solid, and level structure. If you’re off by even a millimetre, it’ll build up as you stack LED tiles on top, leading to damage, artifacting, protrusions, etc. The resulting wall will also be more difficult to do maintenance on because pulling a tile out might damage the delicate diodes.

We recommend opting for base bars with adjustable feet so you can ensure the entire structure is level. You can use a laser level, but a large hand-held carpentry level will also work.

2: Stack your tiles

When stacking your tiles, place one at a time from right to left (from the back of the wall). As you place each tile, make sure to lock it into your base bar and the surrounding tiles before moving on to the next one. Always stack one row at a time, from right to left.

Make sure each seam lines up perfectly. Every misaligned millimeter compounds as you stack the tiles, leading to large seams (that are visible on camera) and possible damage to the diodes.

3: Build your stacking support system

As you stack your tiles, you should also build your rear base trusses. Every second column should have a rear base truss, and every second or third row should have a rear connector to connect the tiles to the stacking bar.

4: Add counterweights

Counterweights are essential for making sure your volume doesn’t lean or worse, fall over (yikes). These counterweights will typically take the form of sandbags or equivalent, and you can expect them to be essentially a permanent fixture if you have ground support. Ceiling and wall mounts don’t require counterweights.

The Setup

The final step is to set up your power and data cabling. Your integrator (that’s us!) will give you a power and data cabling map that shows how your cables should connect to each tile.

Data Cabling

All data cables are daisy-chained with one output per set amount of LEDs. The number of LEDs you have on a single daisy chain will determine your bit rate, or fidelity. The less tiles connected on a single daisy chain, the higher your fidelity. However, since that means you’ll have more daisy chains overall, you’ll need to make sure your processor(s) can support that number.

Power Cabling

Similarly, the overall number of power cable daisy chains will be dependent on your power supply.

Ideally, every single column of tiles would have its own 20 Amp breaker on your electrical panel. More realistically, if you haven’t thought about this and you're plugging multiple LED columns into an existing power outlet, you may have to connect less tiles on a single daisy chain, especially if you have tiles with very high nits. Otherwise, you run the risk of blowing a fuse and damaging your tiles and ancillary equipment such as your LED processor.

Depending on the size of your wall, you still may need a distribution box. However, distribution boxes can get pretty expensive, so if you have a smaller LED wall, it may be more cost-effective to just install custom outlets into your existing breaker.

When we work on LED volume integrations, we typically do the power cabling first, since the data cabling requires more cables. This can help make sure your cables stay organized.

After that all that’s left to do is plug your wall into your LED processor and do your calibration.

TLDR:

1. Figure out your LED volume/wall size
2. Choose your mounting
3. Figure out your electrical setup
4. Build your base bars
5. Stack tiles
6. Build your stacking support system
7. Add counterweights
8. Set up your power cables
9. Set up your data cables

Building an LED wall is a delicate balancing act of different factors that can quickly become overwhelming, so feel free to ask us questions at hi@copilotco.io or DM us. There’s also a ton of really talented people in the VP community so reach out to them too!

Has anybody tried the Micro Studio camera for VP? I was looking at it for another project but I read it can be genlocked when using an ATEM switcher. Not sure how that would work with a VP workflow but at its price point, it could be an interesting option.

Hey, what tool do you use for compositing in UE 5.5? I've seen about the Composure plug-in in UE but wanted to ask if there is another tool out there that you folk use for this ^^

Hello there!

I try to do some real-time composure with the "Composure Compositing".

My problem is that the Preview looks much different than my scene in the viewport, like there is no Lumen on the Preview.. I need a live preview of my composite for real-time virtual production, so I cannot just render my scene later on.

Or maybe is there another way to get Virtual Production done in real-time and not via the Composite Preview Window? Because what I did so far is to create a new composition, create a cg_element for my environment and a media_plate for my real-life footage (my camera which is connected to the pc via a capture card). This is for my bachelor thesis and my goal is to get a result in real time.

Maybe someone here know more, thank you!

https://preview.redd.it/zradz5bmkede1.png?width=2883&format=png&auto=webp&s=c2662847e20afef72f0d3b244ff1e66726f6fdb4

Sup everyone! I'm a video production manager, we mostly do news, brodcasting and narrative content, but we also produce some sketch/parody shows. So I would like to implement virtual production. My goal is to find a way to produce photorealistic virtual backgrounds that fit our needs.
My questions:
- Do some suitable set-design courses exist?
- Is it possible to go with aximmetry software only or we should use it along with Unreal?
- Now we're stable af using tripods, but I want to change this. What kind of low budget tracking system you'd recommend?

Thanks in advance!

having an issue where the sony venice 2 is falling out of sync with our disguise machines. trying to do 24p. Using evertz genlock to sync. We don’t have this issue with with our red global shutter cameras. Any ideas on solve?

Hi All,

would anyone have any UK links to replacement mo-sys reflective stars, or links to aftermarket ones that will also work well, Ta

Hi folks, hope you all are doing good!
I have a dji pocket 3 camera, it has moving gimbal with facial tracking. I was looking for some insights on how to send the data from the gimbal to the camera to create a in-house ICVFX experience.
Currently DJI software does not output any usable data, but I was wondering if I can get a recommendation of a sensor that I can attach to it and try to make this happen!
Cheers

Hey everyone - recently joined the world of VP at my office with Vu One Mini installs in 3 of our offices. Still getting everything re-situated, and still excited.

I've noticed immediately that using our Canon EOS R's, that there is NO WAY around screen tear and I'm pretty sure it has to do with the nature of the camera itself (sensor/processing etc...).

Connected an older Sony PMW camera (1080p) and sure enough, it went away completely. Proves to me that you can NOT just use any camera with these setups.

That being said, I'd love to hear what sub $10k everyone has been using. There are a LOT of options but Blackmagic and RED seem to be the most widely used. I'm curious about everyone's experience with either brand, and if there's any workflow advantage to either.

Thanks!

https://preview.redd.it/tgmd9t9a3tbe1.jpg?width=4032&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0c03a803191cfc5c6c1665f6f0320bfaab674fb5

Hi everyone,

With the release of Unreal Engine 5.5, Epic Games has marked SMPTE 2110 support as "production-ready." This seems like a big step forward, especially given the potential advantages of over-IP workflows compared to traditional SDI for real-time video pipelines.

That said, the video "Inside Unreal: Professional Video I/O with SMPTE 2110" is already a year old, and I’m wondering what the current state of things looks like. Is SMPTE 2110 truly a viable solution for a Virtual Production setup with LED walls, or does SDI still hold the edge for reliability and simplicity?

I’m designing a new Virtual Production studio and would love to hear from those who have experience with SMPTE 2110. Would you consider it for a fresh build, or stick to SDI? What's the real-world experience like today?

Thanks in advance for your insights!

Complete beginner at Unreal here.

So I need an environment/background for a scene. I found an environment on Fab that is exactly what I need BUT I’m wondering if it’s standard to be able to change the time of day to make it a night scene? Also wondering if it would be feasible for a beginner to put additional assets on the desk.

https://www.fab.com/listings/3340d712-649b-4788-bfc1-8137c1db4afa

Ideally I could purchase a premade environment and then learn a few things to tweak it here and there to make it what I need. Not sure I want to learn the program from the ground up. Thanks for any guidance!

We are due to shoot a rooftop scene against a curved LED wall showing a skyline backplate.

• LED wall will have a 3° arc angle.
• Our backplate will be a panoramic city skyline

My question is: is it necessary to reproject our “flat” content backplate (in something like N Display or Disguise) to compensate for the curvature of the LED wall from the cameras perspective? Or will the curve be so negligible that it won’t be apparent?

Hey we have a studio space set up in northern Dallas Metroplex, a LED wall in place, and the majority of gear in for tracking into Unreal Engine for virtual production. Our tech had an amazing opportunity come up, we're happy for him, but are now in need of someone local to help get the technology installed and running.

Paid gig to finish install. Room for hiring in near future if the fit is right. Also room to be our recommended VP technician or Director of VP role for productions renting the studio out.

Immediate need, please reach out if interested.

As a bit of introduction, I worked in the past for companies making autostereoscopic displays (also called glasses free 3D displays, think about the Nintendo 3DS). I was always surprised on the good reaction that we always got when somebody saw the technology, but then... well, nothing. Right now there are a few products from Acer and Lenovo that you can buy, yet not much movement. I wonder if this is just an issue with lack of tools for production (which is indeed a huge problem), hardware being expensive, or that the technology is more a gimmick: cool to see it once, but that's all.
Any thoughts?

Looking to buy a laptop and wandered about people's experience using ue5 for VP.

The choice seems to come down to AMD Radeon RX 6800M (12gb) or RTX 3070 (8gb) at the few laptops I'm looking g at.

Thoughts?

https://youtu.be/Er9I0WpLvYc

Hi all,

I primarily work as a cinematographer and have been following the virtual production scene for a while now and even flirted with a few jobs on a volume in the past (nothing yet though). I want to get a head start and I’m planning on running a test soon on two different kinds of LED wall, I’ll have details on them shortly, one is film production quality and the other I’m not sure yet (I know someone who knows someone who just installed a wall in their studio). The purpose of the test is see how the focal falloff of large format sensors works with the wall in a few Unreal scenes and various lighting conditions.

I plan to use a Fujifilm GFX100ii with GF and Premista lenses, a RED V-Raptor and a RED s35 Dragon as a control. I’m curious about the GFX because it has the largest sensor of any camera besides the ARRI Alexa 65. I’ll also have hands on with the cinevised GFX Eterna when they ship in a few months, the addition of genlock and timecode makes that platform very appealing if this test has merit. I’ll possibly also have a Sony Venice 2 and ARRI Alexa LF on hand too, that’s a maybe right now.

The basics of it being I want to see how the larger sensors focal falloff resolves at various focal lengths and varying subject to wall distances, the idea being to see if there’s a sweet spot for sensor size, focal length and subject to wall distance and to see how much we can get away with or what an acceptable limit might be. But always keeping an eye on a balance of quality and scale, that’s useful data for cost scaling jobs in my mind.

I want to do this because of the kind of ‘flat’ results I’ve seen from some LED wall projects, and also because I’ve heard of pixel dragging or tearing from the walls resolving in-camera and that usually being the result of lower quality screens or less than ideal workflows (then of course those shots requiring a post-vfx background replacement and thus negating half of the appeal of volume work to me). As not everyone has an ILM quality volume available to them I’m wondering if some of the benefits of large format can smooth out the results optically and in-camera, but truthfully I’m not 100% sure what the causes of pixel artefacts appearing in-camera might be? I can take an educated guess from the camera side but if the problem usually exhibits from the wall side of things I might need some guidance. Do the types of scenes play a part at all? Like, would a neon-lit rainy city exterior with its sharp geometry and glistening highlights cause more artefacting or aliasing than say, an overcast grassy valley?

I’d like to know if I’m creating objective parameters for testing and would appreciate any insight or discussion.

TL;DR

I’m gonna test big sensor cameras on an LED wall, what reasons do LED walls show in-camera artefacting?

Has anybody solved the lack of genlock on the fx6 and sync it correctly?

We're an established production studio shooting traditional high-end production and greenscreen for the last 10 years. We have done 5-6 shoots for VR using 1 camera Virtual Production in the past, but now we're upgrading our studio workflow to two cameras and K live keying (addingLED volume later 2025). DM me for details.

Hello.
I'm a software (fullstack) programmer now working for a tv channel. I got hired because I have experience as a backend programmer and some experience with Unreal Engine (UE, I use it for my gamedev passion).
Anyway, since I'm at the part of my career where I want to specialize myself, I thought that this mission would be the perfect moment to try and do that.
But since this industry is new to me, I have still a lot to learn + the fact that the project I was initially hired for keeps getting delayed, I don't have much informations from my environment.

So I was thinking of specializing in this as a software dev would be a good idea?
Ngl, I care about one thing. If it's payed well enough when freelancing. As a Java dev I can ask something around 500/600 as a daily rate with my current experience. Can I find something similar in this industry?

Bonus point if the job includes programming (or doing whatever) with Unreal (I also fucking love Houdini from SideFx and it has some programming in it).

Any advices/tips (stack/langages and tech wise, anything really) ? And how's the market for programmers in virtual production?

i worked in VFX as a compositor (AE and Nuke) and vfx shoot supervisor and then switched to IT as a software developer. i am now thinking of doing some short films using Unreal and Blender and hopefully get a role in Virtual Production. My question is, how much gear do I need to fully qualify in Virtual Production roles like in LED Volume studios? Or just being capable in Unreal and 3d enough? i'm trying to budget and i'm looking at different gear that needs to be purchased to make a real time VP film at home. i already have a camera (an old GH5) and an M Macook but do i need a beefy PC with a good GPU, iPhone (for JetSet) + Accsoon SeeMo or Vive tracker, green screen set, lights, etc? how much of these gear are needed to build a portfolio for someone who wants to find a role in the industry? thanks for any advice from the helpful people of this sub! :)

I'm looking to collaborate on game development projects, with a focus on 3D asset design, where I have more experience and knowledge. While I’m still learning game development, I’m eager to contribute to your project by creating high-quality 3D models, environments, and assets. I’m open to both paid and free opportunities, and I’m excited to work with others to grow my skills while helping bring your game ideas to life!

https://preview.redd.it/vx67vls9k65e1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=ae5cac4069ea8f2956cdd25760fd57d3780b7fda

https://preview.redd.it/ofl96e9bk65e1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=3aff0cfd896ed387f1b8b6abc6b9bb56bcb87f23

https://preview.redd.it/pty114rbk65e1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=13300f20c30f68ecac30483fd85e47a8dc304fa1

We have experience with VIVE/Steam 2.0 tracking, and are looking to upgrade to a better system. Retracker looks super easy, reliable, and affordable to us right now.