Uncanny
YEAR: 2020
WHAT IS Uncanny?
Who is Uncanny? Uncanny is a digital studio that focusses on making your ideas become reality. By combining expertise along different domains they create visually engaging motion, interactive and video experiences. These experiences align perfectly with the clients’ wishes. What really drew us to work with Uncanny again was their expertise using the Unreal gaming engine, especially pertaining to its use in broadcasting.
TEST CASE @ VRT 5Y Sandbox Sessions
Like mentioned before, we produced our Sandbox Sessions using only one computer, a game engine and a tracked camera. So… how does that work? Most people know the principles of a live greenkey workflow, you capture a person or object before a green screen, you key the background out and composite the video stream in a new environment.
Working with the Unreal game engine doesn’t change the work process much, it just makes it more manageable and affordable with amazing graphical power. Using a gaming engine really gives you a whole slew of new possibilities, it is a tool where you can built all kinds of features in that fit your workflow. The set up in the studio is pretty simple, you have a green screen, a camera with a mounted tracker, 2 lighthouses (HTC Vive VR set up) and a power pc (GPU) with a capture card (sdi input in our case), the gaming engine is running the show. The tracker on the camera in combination with the lighthouses will give realtime positional data, matching the real camera with the virtual camera in Unreal.
The last couple of years gaming engines have moved on from gaming to many different sectors and domains like architecture, engineering, product design, and most importantly for us, media. It allows the user a newfound freedom that’s not usually associated with boxed broadcast solutions. The virtual studio of the future creates new possibilities, like for example shooting different productions using just one studio.
LEARNINGS
The most important question after a case is; what did we learn?
With this use case we found that the set up performed very well during our Sandbox Sessions but there are definitely improvements to be made. We want to look into improving the movability of our tracked camera, although the tracking data was very accurate and swift, the mount wasn’t stable enough to make a handheld shot.
With this system we can offer high quality broadcasting for a low cost. Using it in a separate production like the Sandbox Sessions worked really well and we are curious to see how this set up will be used in traditional broadcasting pipelines.
Go to the website of Uncanny ->