Barriers to XR Adoption in Virtual Production — Part 5

And how to get past them — A guide for users

This series is an extension of an article by Nils Porrmann, Thomas Kother and myself posted at dandelion + burdock
You can read the full article at the frame:work website

Budget

Yes, this is (*&$ing expensive, don’t shy away from that fact

I expect the client may have laughed at your first bid. Or possibly you were told your proposal was more than the entire shoot budget. Perhaps a forward thinking line producer doubled the budget you used on the last project together. It’s still not enough. Worse, you haven’t been working much lately and really can’t afford to not do this gig. So what now?

Don’t hide the real costs. You never want to be in a position that you overrepresented your capabilities on an underfunded budget.

Start with the most reliable, well backed up system you can design staffed by enough team members to keep a project in motion even when some of you get bogged down solving technical issues. If you are new to XR, add 20% and another engineer. You’ll need it. Itemize everything clearly but as concepts, not individual pieces of gear, and be prepared to explain the impacts of not having each line item. Explain where compromises can be made the result of those choices. Also, prepare a budget for a 2D version of the project, one without tracked cameras and spatially responsive content. Use this to represent the cost difference between XR and a traditional screen control team and system.

This only covers engineering and operations. Content budgeting for XR has its own escalation of costs and the content studios with the expertise to build worlds for XR, like the teams that build and support XR infrastructure, are in short supply. Advise your producer handling budget to expect these costs if content production comes from another team outside your budget scope.

You will also need to clearly outline the time factor of XR, even when you can’t represent the full costs in your own budget. Those camera calibration days? Clarify the other production team members not represented in your budget that you will need to participate on those days so the line producer can fully understand the cost implications. One hour ESU? Maybe you need two hours to start the day correctly or an extra morning set aside every few days to keep your system running smoothly.

One of the complexities of building a budget is clear understanding of the project requirements. A challenge of XR budgeting is the layers of assumptions made by both client and provider to the needs of a production. This is often complicated by the interconnectedness of the camera(s) to the XR system. In the past, I would be concerned I didn’t have adequate coverage in the signal flow to allow any truck signal to hit any screen. Now I’m concerned the director doesn’t know the camera restrictions. One of those conversations is a much easier fix.

My point is shot planning, while familiar territory for the film world, is not a thing for live events. Typically the live event world feels more like a documentary of a staged performance. Sure there are planned, even choreographed shots and I’ve worked with excellent directors. But much of the finesse of those shots evolves in the room, during rehearsal, where the camera is a creative extension of the director’s process. The XR team is now stomping all over the director’s process, so it’s going to go about as well as you think it will when you say, “yeah, you can’t pan that far, we ran out of content budget.”

I believe the solution to the budget problem is spending more money on previsualization. Don’t look at previz as an added layer of complexity; it is a natural extension of content creation for XR. Previz will encourage critical decision making that will improve the XR Production process on site.

To bring production costs down, we need to solve problems before we are on site together. That way we can focus on only the problems that come up from building a defined plan, rather than discovering the plan while we are concurrently solving problems. We’ll get back to the live-ness of live, but it’s an evolution. We have incredible tools to engage directors, show them the world they’ll be shooting in, both on a monitor and via VR, and let the big creative choices happen before the real expense of production starts.

I don’t have a bullet point list to give you on how to sell your budget. You will unfortunately have to make compromises and you will get frustrated. Your clients are frustrated too. Their bosses think Virtual Production is a suped-up Zoom call and have slashed budgets 40%. But start with clarity, ask your client to understand XR Production is new, expensive and as exciting as they think it is, but you need resources to do it well, unlike what you’ve needed in the past. And then you can tackle the schedule discussion.

Schedule

It’s also ($&@ing time consuming, what about it

Clearing stating schedule needs will be new territory for most of us working in XR. Most of us are given a schedule and told to stick to it. Occasionally I might control the start date for my team and be asked to advise on how much time we need to build our media server system and prep content for rehearsal. XR Production requires that we advise a production on our critical time requirements to be successful.

Each system and approach will determine how much time you need, but I often hear two days per tracked camera for calibration. That’s after you have installed your system and have it fully functional, another two to three days at least. This describes building a volume from scratch, as opposed to renting an XR Production Studio where these tools have already been installed.

Once you have an operational system, maintenance time should be scheduled into the production calendar to offset unplanned recalibration needs or technical issues. For the time being, we need to assume XR Production is slower and plan that way. What you are providing is the tools of post production into the shooting process, so in truth it’s not as slow as it feels for what is being achieved.

Of course, these time requirements are expensive. It’s one thing to have a projection team align projectors overnight on a skeleton crew. It’s quite another endeavor to require the full XR, camera and engineering departments to participate in days of calibration and tests.

We expect these time demands will become greatly reduced in the future. What takes days to calibrate will become a 15 minute warm up cycle at the start of the day. Currently, we have to understand the implications of doing this work now, in its early development. Hiding or avoiding these time considerations will further impact XR adoption by having productions fail or go way over budget during the shoot.

Time is the safety net to XR Production success.

Part 6 will cover final learning advice and industry resources