Photos: ARRI / Landscape plate: David Noton
JULY 2021; Burbank, CA – Megapixel’s HELIOS® LED Processing Platform drives ARRI’s new state-of-the-art mixed reality studio located at their Uxbridge, UK location. The studio, designed and built by ARRI, is one of the largest permanent mixed reality production spaces in Europe, comprising 343 square meters of LED walls, installed in partnership between ARRI and Creative Technology.
The fully-encapsulated yet flexible space can be programmed to display 360-degree imagery that, even when not in-frame, casts dynamic, fully integrated lighting effects onto the performers and the scene being shot.
HELIOS was selected because of its ability to deliver cinema-grade color workflow and industry-leading image quality. The complete system allows ARRI to achieve superior in-camera LED quality for the studio. “The HELIOS platform was the logical choice for our volume,” comments Sean Ryan, Stage Manager of ARRI’s studio at Uxbridge. “The quality of the image processing and LED together are fantastic on camera.”
“Megapixel has been fantastic to work with, providing a powerful, robust platform with excellent support,” says Tom Burford, Head of Technical Services at Creative Technology. “In Virtual Production, a clean pipeline and accurate colour reproduction are essential to a great looking result in camera. HELIOS provides this with a very precise representation of our content, so it’s exciting to see this working together in the ARRI stage.”
The playback system designed by Creative Technology coupled with HELIOS makes playback in the production volume simple. HELIOS integrates with the other systems at the stage: Epic Games provided its flagship real-time 3D creation Unreal Engine, and NVIDIA’s RTX A6000 GPUs drive the image processing.
“We are excited to be a part of this new studio space,” says Jeremy Hochman, co-founder and CEO of Megapixel. “We have cooperated with both ARRI and Creative Technology for in-camera LED applications before, and this is such a great reference of how to do things the right way.”
Find Megapixel VR at https://megapixelvr.com
Find ARRI at www.arri.com
Find Creative Technology at www.ct-group.com
