Hue-Preserving Color Transforms for LED Wall Virtual Production Workflows

Speaker: Michael D. Smith

• Virtual Production using LED wall display technology is gaining popularity in the entertainment industry to produce motion pictures, episodic television, live broadcast and esports content. This new paradigm typically uses one or more large LED displays that contains millions of individual Light Emitting Diodes (LED) that are used to display a virtual background and/or foreground objects from a virtual scene that is simultaneously captured by the digital photographic camera on set, resulting in so-called "in-camera visual effects". Realtime video game rendering engines update the image shown on the LED wall image to compensate for changes in camera location, camera pose and focal length. Modern digital camera workflows typically include color transforms that were not designed to accurately render the large areas of saturated colors that are possible when capturing the image shown on an LED wall. Some examples of a hue shift that can occur in typical workflows are blue to cyan, red to pink, red to orange and green to yellow. We found these hue shifts can occur dynamically while racking focus to and from the LED wall, and also statically when the LED wall is kept out of focus, which is a common technique that is used to minimized moiré artifacts. This paper explores a simple modification of these common color transforms to preserve the hue of the scene while also creating a similar Look of the existing color transforms