Interview with Blaine Johnstone

catch up with

Blaine Johnstone

Blaine is the Rental Partner Manager at PSCo, overseeing the live event and exhibition rental accounts. Let’s hear his views on virtual production.

Is there a high demand for virtual production?

Could this become the new standard? Virtual production was already in action, but it wasn’t widely used until the pandemic. The film industry had to find alternative ways of production and 90% of our customers transitioned to virtual production because they had to.

Using LED backdrops and Unreal Engine has set a standard within the filmmaking industry. And studios are being built to accommodate this shift. However, filmmakers still want to film on location. It won’t mitigate the traditional methods, but it will be different. Now, you can send a small crew out rather than the full production team.

How can PSCo support virtual production projects?

How does virtual production compare to more traditional methods of filming? We can pretty much offer the full virtual production package to customers. We offer both the sales and hire of the key components to the virtual production set-up. The LED is the main feature, but we also offer video processing and media server elements which are just as important.

Virtual production requires a lot of pre-production which means directors can streamline the process. It also massively reduces costs because, for example, you’re not actually sending a train off a bridge, it’s just happening on the LED screen. Virtual environments are normal but location shooting and green screen will never be made redundant.

What is the golden rule? Every product in the chain plays a key part. The LED must be high quality for the camera to film against. Processing needs to be able to push low latency and high frame rate. Camera tracking needs to pinpoint the exact location of the camera X, Y & Z axis. Along with all the experienced technicians and directors on set. The whole experience is impressive.

What is the most impressive piece of technology you’ve seen? The engine that drives it all and the servers which are the glue of virtual production. They take all the camera tracking information and data from the virtual environment to push out the finished product onto the LED screen. All of this is in real-time with very little latency.