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Garden Studios’ virtual production stage uses an LED backdrop to create realistic driving scenes (Image: Jasmin Shah)
Garden Studios’ virtual production stage uses an LED backdrop to create realistic driving scenes (Image: Jasmin Shah)

Virtual Production: Garden Studios Expands Stage With Brompton

The London studio has added a movable, high-resolution LED ceiling to a larger stage designed primarily for driving scenes.

The installation combines a 24-by-5-meter (79-by-16-foot) curved ROE Visual LED wall with a 10-by-5-meter (33-by-16-foot) Absen LED ceiling. Developed with Cirrolite, the ceiling rig can travel as far as 20 meters (66 feet) and move between horizontal and vertical positions.

Brompton Technology’s Tessera SX40 LED processor and Tessera XD 10G data distribution units drive the ceiling. Garden Studios continues to use the Tessera S8 processors purchased for its original virtual production volume, which opened in 2021, to power the main wall.

Moving the ceiling, not the vehicle

The movable ceiling can be repositioned within, above or around the stage and can also function as a front wall for 360-degree shooting. According to Garden Studios, it can switch from a fully enclosed configuration to one suitable for rain scenes in less than a minute.

That flexibility allows production crews to change the position of reflections without repeatedly moving a vehicle. The Absen ceiling’s tighter pixel pitch is also intended to produce sharply focused windshield reflections without visible pixelation.

“The reason they needed an SX40 for the ceiling is because it’s on a moving track, going from horizontal to vertical,” said Patrick Goodden, technical sales manager for the UK and Ireland at Brompton Technology.

Fiber connections between the processor and XD units reduce the amount of cabling that has to move with the ceiling.

Processing for different frame rates

Garden Studios uses the stage for high-end television, film and commercial productions, which can require several frame rates. Brompton’s ShutterSync feature synchronizes the LED refresh with a camera’s shutter settings to help prevent on-camera artifacts.

Other Tessera tools include Dark Magic and Extended Bit Depth for low-brightness operation, PureTone calibration and support for 3D lookup tables. The integration with Pomfort Livegrade allows digital imaging technicians and directors of photography to grade the LED display through software already used in production workflows.

Garden Studios also uses Brompton’s API to automate tasks such as displaying a chroma green card or freezing the LED wall while content reloads and says it has completed more than 150 productions across its virtual production stages during the past five years.