Image Based Lighting - Current Capabilities and Limitations

The widespread adoption of Virtual Production workflows in general and ICVFX (In- Camera Visual Effects) with LED video screens in particular undoubtedly represents some of the biggest technological advancements in film and television production in recent years. With modern color management workflows and frameworks, we can gain full colorimetric control over our entire video/real-time pipeline. However, Virtual Production is not based on LED video screens alone. Image-based lighting (IBL), a computer graphics lighting method well understood in visual effects production, has now evolved into principal photography lighting workflow where the LED video screens are augmented with traditional lighting fixtures, and the video content used to drive the LED video screens also drives the lighting fixtures. While today's lighting fixtures can produce accurate, beautiful, high quality light for magnificent skin tone reproduction, these protocols must evolve to sufficiently communicate all necessarily color and other device parameters to do so. In this paper, we will review and evaluate existing control protocols and data exchange formats and propose a unified, device independent control and metadata infrastructure for both video and lighting systems that will generate a predictable outcome regardless of manufacturer, device type, color space, media source, and control system.

Published

2022-10

Content type

Original Research

Keywords

Virtual Production, Image Based Lighting, In-Camera Visual Effects, Color Management, Lighting, LED, Video

DOI

10.5594/M001992

ISBN

978-1-61482-963-8