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Comment by RicoElectrico | Hacker News Reader

The LED screen thing is so absurd that for a long time I assumed they just replace the content in post somehow and its purpose is merely to aid in lighting and for actors to orient better in the scene.

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I guess current pipelines depends a lot on chroma key for the matte so isolating the actors cheaply might be hard with such complex backgrounds? Seems like it might not be long until we can automate that in such a controlled environment though.

I don’t see why it’s so absurd, with how cheap display tech has become recently. Ambitious, maybe, but it seemed to work pretty well in The Mandolorian.

The Mandalorian was also an interesting case where they almost had to use a solution like on-set LED screens due to the reflectivity of his armor.

Yeah, from what I saw they originally took the plunge to build the ‘tank’ due to the armour but ended up using it for almost everything because it was so flexible and convenient.

At that point, I wonder if it would have been easier to use motion capture and insert the actor's armor, helmet etc. via CGI too?

Then you have to also model all the other actors and the entire rest of the scene, including practical effects. Otherwise you get Phantom Menace style 3D visuals with close-enough cube maps that end up looking very game-y.

At least on The Mandolarian this is what happened. Everything behind the actors in the camera's frame would be green while the rest of the volume was used to have a lowres lighting reference for the scene. So essentially it would be a moving green screen. The Unreal output was never directly used in the finished show.

I'm pretty sure this is false and the wall was visible in many scenes

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gUnxzVOs3rk

I'm not sure you can trust behind the scenes featurettes like this anymore.

See https://youtu.be/7ttG90raCNo for more details.

If you just watch the show you can see the Volume screens pretty clearly. The transition from the real set floor to the floor in the screen is usually pretty obvious.

This is a really good video. The entire series of videos is great. Thanks for posting!

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