NAB 2025: Virtual Production, Gaussian Splats, Budget Friendly Gear and More!

0:00In this episode of The Noise, let's talk about all things NAB.

0:07all right hello addy hey joey where are you at the convention just ended they just had the call at the 2 p.m call and everyone cheered and now we're in the hallway because we're kicked out of the convention center here talking to you but yeah i'm bummed that you were not able to make it this year i'm super bummed break it down and i've been getting a lot of dms like where are you at we're at this party i'm like guess what i didn't come this year a good amount of people asking and being like, hey, say hi to Addy for me or, you know, where's Addy at? Also a good amount of love for the podcast and people seeing what we're doing.

0:35So I always appreciate that. That's been really great to see. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. So my brain's a bit fried and still processing everything. But let's break down what trends that you saw that surfaced online. You know, I've been in the weeds here and you've probably had a higher level view. So from what you've seen, what stood out most to you from all the news coming out of NAB? Yeah, I was really surprised to see virtual production front and center three, four years in a row. And this year, you know, we thought we would see sort of a gentle slowdown of virtual production development and new product cycles.

1:09However, I was totally wrong. There seems to be a new flurry of activity around VP, despite the industry slowdown. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, there were a lot of new virtual production updates and solutions. I mean, one of the big ones we talked about in the pre-show, So Ocellus from Sony, their new camera tracker. And so we've got a breakdown with that. Another really cool one that I had seen some previews of before is the View One Mini, which is their sort of all self-contained mobile screen. But this time it was fully built out. It has the integrated lighting on the side. It has camera tracking built in, which they said because they know the size of the screen, there's no calibration needed.

1:47It's just kind of set. And so it can kind of track a camera. And if you're doing some parallax effects or moves. And that's just kind of a very impressive solution. Definitely the trend I did see, though, and also with like AR Wall and what they're pushing is a lot of educational market push, virtual production in the education space and corporate space. And it's trends that we've been talking about before, just like smaller solutions, being able to do more with less, but still harnessing the power of virtual production. And then, yeah, even also on the smaller end, Lightcraft Jet Set, which we've talked about before, and they were here at NAB last year, but they also had some really impressive improvements and demo.

2:21Now they're having like interesting use cases come out of Lightcraft being used on animation projects, on just some crazy good looking student and short films. Maybe student is an understatement, but just, you know, people doing stuff in tiny, tiny green screen rooms with some of the wrinkliest, worst looking green screens that I've seen. But the end result that they're able to get out of just using their iPhone as a tracker and some cinema cameras and Blender and some other tools is amazing. Absolutely. And we talked about this on our show before. Lightcraft is sort of in between the extreme professional end of it, which is James Cameron's Lightstorm solutions for Avatar, and an extreme sort of consumer end of it.

3:02And they're somewhere in the middle where they have like 90 % of the usability for a professional audience and a professional tool set at a consumer price. This is like$80 or something like that a month. So it's incredible value. Yeah, for their top level. Absolutely. And I want to hang on Vue One Systems for a bit. This is a company that I've been watching closely for a long time. Obviously, I know Tim and Daniel and the team over there. And they transitioned successfully from a stage network and one that was focusing on services to now offering a fully fleshed out, a really usable product that I think kind of changes the game for virtual production in a big way.

3:41One of the biggest problems with even affordable virtual production solutions is it's not properly integrated. The software is hard to learn. And here comes Vue with the system that literally rolls in. It's on wheels. And then you could use an iPad to just take whatever AI-generated or user-generated image, throw it up very, very quickly. Yeah, and even the controls that that iPad has, the virtual studio, is super impressive because it's not only just loading the image, but it's doing color adjustments. it's repositioning it. They have depth extrusion. So you can take a 2D image and kind of make it faux 3D.

4:16I know it's 2.75D called sometimes enough to give you parallax and some movements and also image based lighting. And it can average out ranges of your image and send the colors to the lights built into the panel. Or you can also connect additional lights to your system. So just kind of like a very well integrated, truly like a virtual production product. Absolutely. And when you especially think about the fact that it's VP outside of film and TV, VP in the house worship space, education space, corporate space, I mean, corporate, those professionals don't have any of our background skill set and the training so they can just plug and play and get all of the benefits of in-camera VFX.

4:56Another interesting virtual production case that I saw was actually at the pre-show. There was a projectors running a virtual production wall. And then they're also working with Kino Flow mimic lights. And so there, it was kind of two use cases in their demo is one was using a projector for virtual projection. And then the other one was running a sort of what ghost frame was the frame remapping to have two dual projection. But what they were showing was one reality was mimic lights and the background was like a beach scene, but obviously that could be anything. And then the alternate reality was green screen, but they're generating the green screen by having mimics shining the green light onto the backdrop and that generated the green mat and then turning off all of the other mimic lights and then there was also another potential use case we forgot to film it using that paper i think it was from netflix or a test from like a year or two ago yes you could shine the magenta on the subjects uh the green on the back or maybe it's the other colors you probably know a lot more about color science than me and then that would give you a way easier way to to create a nice clean mat yes um i think that's the paul de bebek research from eye line.

6:03So the Christie thing we teased in a few episodes ago, I mean, such perfect timing, especially when the industry is looking for cheaper solutions. As you know, the bulk of the cost in a VP stage is going to be the panels and projectors, I think, by surface area to dollar, like come at like a 10 to one or some insane ratio, where it's just far, far cheaper to light something with a projector than it is with the LED wall. And if you're only going to use it for in-camera VFX, not necessarily light the subjects, but to just have the background replacements, projectors are perfect for that. So bold move on Christy's part here.

6:41What weaknesses would you see with a projector versus an LED wall? The biggest one that I can think of is interference with physical lighting. So if you have lots of lights on a set, you're easily going to wash out the projector and the screen versus an LED wall, which can put out a much higher brightness value. Or just a lot more flags than you might have used in the past to compensate. And it's clever on Christie's part to partner up with KinoFlow and Mimic because those lighting systems are almost like a hybrid between an LED wall and a real light. And so you're getting the benefits of an LED wall without using any of it in the stage.

7:18I will say with continuing with virtual production, two trends that kind of came up in various conversations and speaking with the foundry with the nuke stage launching 2d plate backgrounds and 2.5d plate backgrounds being a lot more common and a lot of finding a lot more use cases than going the full route of building a full 3d environment a lot of people are saying that just dps like working with 2d plates especially of images and that in a lot of use cases 2d or 2.5d is is plenty for virtual production and this is it's funny that it kind of comes back to me on this one. This is the narrative that I've built at Disguise three years ago because, you know, we were seeing a lot of customers firsthand struggle with finding Unreal artists, not really knowing the full procedure of creating Unreal Engine scenes.

8:02Now, Unreal is great for certain use cases where you need full 3D and full parallax and you have the budget for it, but 99 % of the time, and I'm talking about the same audience that's using a V1 system, they don't need the full power of Unreal. Sometimes a really high quality image, even 8-bit is good enough. And then the other trend buzzword, and I think we talked about this in our pre-episode, Gaussian splats, a lot of Gaussian splats. I talked to Valinga about their Asus color pipeline for Gaussian splats. Track down X-Grid, which is another LiDAR scanner, but the big advantage that they have is they can do the LiDAR scan and capture the scene with their cameras and do a Gaussian splat processing in their software.

8:42You don't have to do any extra steps. and the Gaussian splats that they were demoing from like some apartment scanning looked amazing, extremely impressive and very simple to process. Lightcraft, JetSight also is supporting Gaussian splats, bringing it inside the app. That was just like a very common, like out of all of probably the, you know, it's technically a form of AI out of like all of the AI, the buzzwords and terms, Gaussian splats was probably like the biggest one on my radar from it. Yeah, it's the one with the most immediate application and the most immediate perceived value, right?

9:11A lot of use cases in not just virtual production, but also in VFX is just taking a place that exists and bringing it into the digital realm and replicating it, whether on an LED wall or compositing it in a nuke. And Gaussian Splats offer you that ability. You get the full benefits of 3D. You don't have to figure out photogrammetry. You're not spending hours and hours trying to fine tune this solve. You know, it just kind of all does it for you with AI magic. Speaking of AI magic, do you want to move on? Absolutely. Yeah. What did you see? I mean, it felt like some of the big AI companies were there, maybe not with Boots, but certainly in press.

9:49I mean, honestly, it felt like the opposite. Like I really did not see any of the big name AI players, you know, that we would know online, like Runway or Mid Journey or even, you know, I expected maybe stability because they've had kind of the biggest push into the film industry. Really didn't see that. Maybe saw Runway logo once or twice, you know, because they have a partnership with some companies, but really kind of no demos or presence from them. I think I had a chance to talk to them. I saw one company that was advertising like generative storyboards. It looked kind of similar to LTX video, but different space.

10:22But yeah, as far as fully generative stuff, I really did not see much. I remember last year, it was an NAB happened like kind of right after the Sora video came out. And so that was like a big, you know, whoa, what's happening? Like, are we going to all be replaced moment. And then, you know, now a year later, it's like, okay, yes, AI video is getting better. I'm sure it's probably not on a lot of people's radar that much here. Coming into this AI was like, oh, you know, it's going to be one of the buzzy, trendy topics. And the reality is like most of the AI applications here are features, not products.

10:53They are additional, you know, tools built in. You know, we talked about Adobe Premiere that you can analyze the footage. Avid, I was trying to get a better understanding of this new feature they added, but something with about you can kind of generatively insert like additional beats or pauses in your video. I was trying to find out from their booth, but they didn't really have any signage about it. I found out from Michael Cioni. But even Avid had some demos with QuickTure, which was an AI editing tool to kind of help you get to first cut, sort of taking all your footage and transcripts and using ChatGPT to help make a assembly cut so that you have something to start off of.

11:26They had some presentations at the Avid booth. And I find that's interesting because Avid and and Avid users are probably some of the most picky, I'm trying to think, old school, least, most averse to change user base. You're probably right on all of those. I mean, just look at Avid's UI. I don't think it's changed since they launched it. So seeing them present Quicker as introducing AI to help speed up things and get you to a first pass is interesting. I think that's definitely the direction things are going to go and Avid's getting on board with that. But everything around AI is, you know, these are features and additional things to help you.

12:09Nothing that's like launching or big that's like, we're going to edit your videos for you or like, we're going to like generate your movies for you. I don't think it would fly here. You know, it would tear apart all of the holes in it. and it's just yeah, most of the AI stuff is just helping analyze footage improvements for transporting media streams or uprising stuff. Yeah, not a ton of general stuff. I saw a lot of AI updates on DaVinci Resolve 20. I think we I mean, those are really powerful updates. They have something called Magic Mat where it's a one-click power window. Let's say you want to color grade the window behind you and not Joey, you just click once on your silhouette and it selects you really accurately frame by frame by frame.

12:55And they have AI subtitles, AI translation. So Blackmagic once again comes through with a slew of updates that are super usable and tangible. Yeah, I'm honestly impressed we've gotten this far in this episode. I have not brought up Blackmagic yet because anytime anyone asks me like, what was the most interesting stuff you saw? I would usually, it's like, you know, I feel like it's a cop out, but like Blackmagic just, they just come with the volume of updates and all the updates are really interesting. Yeah, we talked about the Pixis 12K and the sensor and all of that. And that was great. I mean, honestly, these sort of other, you know, we alluded to this, but the other trendy topic here that I don't think anyone really wanted to have as a trendy topic here were the tariffs.

13:37And especially with Blackmagic, there were a couple updates throughout the show of their initial pricing around the Pixis 12K and then what the pricing would be for the US with the tariffs and then what the pricing that they figured out a new distribution system logistic system to get the price down and then today thursday as we're recording or what what is today wednesday as we're recording this the tariffs are like have a pause so yeah everyone was just every time pricing came up around anything it was always like it's this price for now you know depending but going back to black magic davinci i mean the autofocus update is uh is in beta so That's also another huge update because the one thing their cameras have been lacking is autofocus.

14:16But honestly, Resolve, I think, was the most exciting update. And the other feature is IntelliScript, I believe it's called. And it's basically you can give a script to Resolve and it will do a rough cut of your source footage based on the script. And it'll also find the multiple takes and stack the multiple takes together. So just another tool to really speed up that first cut process. They had a bunch of other updates, too. I mean, they have a podcast editing tool that we will probably lean into for editing this podcast, where it can automatically update the angles. And even cooler, because just behind the scenes, for most of the podcast editing tools that are out there, you have to have separate audio recordings and say, like, this camera angle goes with this audio track.

14:57And if you don't have the isolated audio recordings, most of these podcast editing tools can't really work. Resolve has a feature where it will detect the mouth movement. So even if you had a mixed down audio recording, you didn't have the isolated feeds, it could still figure out who is speaking based on mouth movement and automatically edit and switch between angles. As you mentioned, the social media captioning, dynamic captions, and then just a lot of kind of audio mastering built in as well. Yeah, it's really targeted for YouTube creators, right? I mean, I think Blackmagic looked at their user base is like, which part of our user base is going to have the biggest impact and make the most amount of content?

15:36And it's people like us that are just making content on a biweekly basis and just need a ton of automation tools. I think they now released something, I'm going to call it the autopod killer, where you can have multi cameras and then that AI will kind of figure out which cameras to base on. And the other thing I wanted to say, going back to general AI presence at NAB, when Generative AI first launched a couple of years back, 23, we saw a lot of Generative AI images up on walls. And then last year we did as well. And you're absolutely like, we're missing the big company presence there. We're also missing really useful applications and practical sort of implementations of AI.

16:22It's not enough for the NAB audience to just have a foundational model, right? What do you actually do with it? How does it tie into Avid? How does it tie into Premiere? And all those things I think this audience wants to see. And I think the AI industry is just not there yet. Maybe next NAB, we're going to see more of that. Yeah. I mean, I will say the one company that we saw last year and that seems to have really grown is 12 Labs. and they have their own foundational models trained on video, video understanding, kind of understanding what's happening in the video, scene tagging. And they've had a lot of integration with other tools to like what you're saying with, you know, wherever your media is at, their models can run and analyze the footage to help speed up finding clips, you know, creating highlight reels, just sifting through tons of stuff.

17:09And their models are trained on video unlike a lot of other models where, you know, video is sort of secondary and they're trained more on just text or speech. And so seeing them like the last year, it was sort of had a little tiny booth, like up in the middle of the South Upper Hall. And then this year, they had this kind of bigger booth in West Hall and just like seeing tons of companies come and go talking to them. Impressive to see them like really grow and tap into a lot of existing. Yeah. And I saw that Eric Weaver posted about Beeble. Beeble is a AI based relighting tool. So they were there again in one of those obscure halls that is hard to find.

17:44But certainly, I mean, yeah, they have startup budget, right? It's not, it's scrappy. They have to do things that they can do. Yeah, yeah. Beeble's great. Yeah, we talked to them last year. They're going by Switch Lite, but now they're Beeble. And they had like a lot of kind of tech demos last year and like concepts. But this year they rolled out. It's like now, it feels like Wonder Dynamic Studio. It's a full like web app. You upload your footage, you upload your background plates. You can completely relight your shot. It can take, you know, any professional level media input, video file, and then it can automatically do the compositing, matting, relighting, and then you can export it to whatever format you want.

18:22And it also integrates, they have a version that can integrate with Blender and Unreal. So you can go into the professional pipeline and use their tools in a much more powerful 3D environment. Yeah, Beeble is the one to look out for, I think, in our space. I love that you brought up the tariffs because this got my head spinning as things are happening during NAB. I'm here at home watching the news and I couldn't help but think about the China tariffs, which are now at, I believe, 104%. So let's say you buy something for$100, that's$204 here in the US. And where do you think all of the LED panels in the world come from?

19:00So that's a big problem because if we're going to keep building and growing virtual production here in the States, 99 % chance that that panel is going to come from China. And LED panels are already super expensive. This gives somebody something like Christie a leg up. And I think only Planar, I may be wrong, but Planar is probably the only manufacturer that has any manufacturing capability to make a panel here in the US. Yeah, I think you're completely right. I mean, that's something you don't think about. But yes, that that will definitely affect with the LED panels and what's possible. And also, again, it's like tariffs on China today.

19:35Who knows what it's going to be tomorrow? But yeah, it's just even just the uncertainty that it adds with everything just adds headaches and complexity for planning and people to make decisions, you know, that were when they're trying to build a stage and it's like this stage has to last five, 10 years. You know, I didn't know like, do you buy now? Do you wait until the tariffs go away? Yeah, definitely does not help. What about the big Korean manufacturers, Samsung, LG. Did you say anything notable out of them? Well, Samsung, actually, Samsung had, that was the other big news with Vue. They have a partnership with Vue, and they're rolling out into the virtual production space with their own tiles.

20:13And their tiles looked great, really deep black levels, very low glare. I don't know if you had a chance to see them because you would probably be able to assess the technical comparison of them better than me. But that was the other big demo with Vue and at the Samsung booth. LG, you know I remember they had a pretty big booth last year. I don't even think I saw them. So unless I missed them, I'm not sure if they were here. It seems like Samsung and LG have their foot in the virtual production space. The Vue and Samsung pairing definitely makes sense. I think they need a strong sort of player in the game as an LED manufacturer.

20:48You know, Rho has the partnership with Disguise. And so I think LED panels just kind of need to latch on to actual players in the space who are building stages and powering the technology. Joey, the best part about NAB sometimes is just walking the show floor and discovering something really quirky, something you never expected. Did you have any of those moments? Yeah, I did. So actually, when we were talking to X-Grids, the LiDAR scanner, in the booth right next to them was a company called Pixboom. And they are developing a high-speed camera. They didn't have the pricing yet, but should be considerably less than traditional high-speed cameras.

21:24The specs from this camera, it can shoot 1800 frames per second at 2K or I believe 1000 frames per second at 4K. So just kind of one of those startup cool things to pop out. Their background was in scientific imaging. They're based in China. Curious to see just, you know, high speed photography is always a lot of fun to do. Usually it requires a lot of money. I think the only player in the game is Phantom, which tend to be in the six figures. So this is a welcome entry into this market. It's still a prototype and they said it should start shipping later this year, but I'm excited to see that and the possibilities that that opens up.

21:59I feel like a bigger trend too was just like lower cost tools for things that were traditionally really expensive. So yeah, I also saw another product from Motorized Precision. They built a$10 ,000 cinema robot arm. So that was kind of, we have, like you're saying with high speed cameras, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now potentially we don't know the pricing, but I'm going to imagine in the four to five figures. Cinema camera robots, you know, if you watch like MKBHD's video where he has a high-end cinema robot, you know, it costs a quarter million dollars. Now you could do something that a lot of the similar shots that he does on a device that is 10 to$20 ,000.

22:33What a world we live in. Incredible. And then the other kind of just grab bag of interesting things I saw, Atomos had a few interesting updates. Probably the most video related one was they released their own wireless transmitter set kind of to compete with Hollyland and Teradex and other companies. But then they had their own PTZ camera, which I did not see coming. And also their own headphones. They released their own pair of headphones, which at first I thought was, I don't know, it didn't make sense. But then squeezing them and trying them on, I was like, all right, actually, it seemed pretty comfortable.

23:06And yeah, I'm a big fan of Atmos. I had the neon monitor for a long time and uh on set for any production you can't beat it yeah i mean their monitors are great and i feel like it's probably like they've built great monitors you know where else do you go from there and it's like expanding the ecosystem of of products also launched their own uh cloud storage service as well that integrates with their monitors so you know i could see you know it's like where else you go uh but the headphones it was because they acquired an audio company that i'm blanking out on the name um there's starting to roll in the ip from that company into their own products.

23:37So the headphones seem to be the first role into audio space and audio gear. I'm calling it here, Joey. I think Blackmagic will acquire Atmos and we're going to have the ultimate indie hardware company. Oh, wait, actually, what other thing for Blackmagic? I didn't talk about this in any of my videos, but it is something that we have, we struggled with behind the scenes on the podcast because we're trying to figure out like what hardware can we do to make this process easier? And, you know, we're big fans of the ATEM Mini, but the problem with the ATEM Mini is their audio inputs are pretty crappy.

24:05It's just like a 3.5 millimeter input. And so we'd have to deal with the audio separately. So they did release a new version of the ATEM Mini Extreme, their high-end ATEM Mini. It's like a G2 version of it. And it finally does have two XLR audio inputs. So excited to see that from Blackmagic. Didn't get into it in our videos, but for us, for our specific issue, I was excited. I was like, oh, this could solve our problems. Yeah, it seems like a good point to wrap it up. I mean, from afar, anything we didn't cover that stood out to you that you saw from the No, I think you covered all the big beats there.