About On-Set Facilities
On-Set Facilities is a company that provides virtual production equipment, supervisors and crew to the film and media production industry.
Our solutions reduce the gaps between the real and virtual world
These latency gaps and synchronicity gaps mainly happen when interacting between the real and virtual world. The physical interactions of people on set and the optical recording (i.e. the camera equipment) happen in real time. The virtual parts of the system have to process data, transport data and so on, which create delay in the pipelines.
On occasion, something that happens on set doesn't happen within the virtual world until a number of milliseconds later. These subtle latency issues have a knock-on effect in post-production. When VFX artists have to line up the action that was captured in the virtual world with the action captured in the physical, it’s difficult and very time consuming. We were really fascinated by this area.
We wanted to research and build a solution to reduce these latency issues
We applied to Clwstwr for funding to go towards the research and development of a latency optimised virtual production system specification that we could use to guide our products, services and solutions.
When we had our funding approved, we started our research phase
First, we went on set with production companies. We worked with everything that was on the market to identify where the problems are and where there were opportunities for improvements. We provided our traditional services, but with the added mandate to record the production data, note any areas of latency and highlight any other noticeable problems to inform our research.
We then created our own virtual production system specification, which we called OSFX (On-Set Facilities X-type specification)
The OSFX specification is a repository of production data and on set learning, which then feeds into product development. Once we had this specification, we began putting it into practice through the development and build of a latency-optimised on-set computing platform.
For the build, we started by redefining the hardware and software
The latency appears between the hardware and the software, but it starts with hardware. Our aim was to reduce the latencies and increase synchronicity between the real and the virtual worlds through a mix of OSFX latency optimised hardware and software.
We began by using off-the-shelf components to build the product, and ended up working with computer component manufacturers to combine enterprise workstation and server components with game engines on-set. This was a new thing for the hardware manufacturers, which was exciting for all of us.
The work resulted in the production of our virtual production system, GODBOX
GODBOX is a latency-optimised general computer, based on the OSFX specification, that can be used for multiple situations. It's a system architecture that's built with a focus on optimising the latency and synchronicity to reduce the discrepancies between things that are happening in real time and virtually. Action and human interaction need processing as close to real time as possible. If you're doing things in post-production, you're moving away from the real time. Our GODBOX solution that does the processing gets close to the action and makes this aspect of virtual production more efficient and reliable.
We now offer GODBOX as a latency optimised virtual production solution, complete with all hardware and crew
I hoped that this would be the outcome of our project, but I didn't know quite how to get there. What we have built is a virtual production system specification that reduces the time between what happens in real-life and what happens inside the computer. We needed help to take us through this period of learning. We're at a point now where GODBOX is being used by some of the world's top virtual production studios. Not only that, but as those who developed GODBOX, we have found ourselves working as virtual production supervisors for some of the major production companies, supervising virtual productions in many countries around the world.
We'd never done R&D like this before
In the past, I’d been sceptical about the processes that R&D of this scale would involve. Clwstwr made everything very easy for me to follow, and their input was really valuable. From Clwstwr's money and investment, we’ve developed our specification, built our product and been able to work with the likes of Netflix, Nvidia, Unreal Engine, Unity, ARRI and other large companies within the industry. I’m looking forward to whatever comes next for the OSFX specification and for GODBOX, which have both been very well received by the industry.