What I Learned Testing a LED Volume as a Cinematographer

DP Nicklas Karpaty, FSF in the Virtual Production Studio.

What I Learned Testing an LED Volume as a Cinematographer

A DoP's honest assessment of Virtual Production — what it delivers, and where it doesn't.

I spent a day at Stockholm VP Studio testing their LED volume. Not to be impressed by the technology — I already knew what it could do on paper. I went to answer a narrower question: when a producer asks me whether Virtual Production is right for their project, what should I tell them?

Here is what I found.

The wall is not a screen. It is a light source.

The distinction matters more than any other.

A green screen gives you a background in post-production. An LED volume gives you a background and the light that background would cast. Film a car in a tunnel and the tunnel lighting falls across the bonnet and the actor's face as it actually would. The reflections are real. The ambient wrap is real. Nobody paints it in later.

This is what separates ICVFX — in-camera visual effects — from compositing. The environment is rendered in real time and tracks with the camera, producing genuine parallax and depth. What the sensor sees is close to what the audience will see.

But it is a light source with a specific limitation. Most VP panels are built on RGB diodes, and RGB does not give you a full spectrum — the gaps sit in cyan and deep red, precisely where skin lives. Use the wall as your key on a face and you risk tones that read plastic, magenta-pushed, or simply dead.

In practice this means the volume handles ambience, wrap and reflection beautifully, and you still light your actors with high-CRI fixtures matched to the wall's colour temperature. The wall is an extraordinary environment light. It is not a replacement for knowing how to light a face.

What it changes on set

The director sees the film, not a placeholder. The monitor shows something very near the final image. Creative decisions get made on the day, in the room, with everyone looking at the same thing — instead of deferred into a post-production conversation weeks later.

Actors have somewhere to look. Performance improves when there is a world to react to rather than a blank green expanse and a description of what will eventually be there.

Time stops being an adversary. A sunset can hold for an entire shooting day. No chasing the light, no re-lighting between takes to match a sky that has moved on. The team spends its attention on performance and framing.

DP Nicklas Karpaty, FSF in the Virtual Production Studio.

Where it falls short

This is the part most articles leave out.

It suits some scripts and not others. Driving sequences, science fiction, inaccessible or expensive locations — these are where the volume earns its cost. A dialogue scene in a real apartment does not become better inside a volume. It becomes more complicated.

The savings arrive only if the preparation does. Every virtual environment has to be built, lit and optimised before anyone walks into the studio. Cost moves from production into pre-production; it does not disappear. And for a producer used to a different rhythm, this is the real adjustment: decisions that normally live in post now have to be made — and locked — months earlier. You cannot fix it in post. You fix it in prep.

The colour pipeline still needs work. Getting the direction of light right in camera is an enormous advantage over green screen spill. But marrying a physical foreground to a rendered background so they read as one photographic space is genuinely difficult, and it takes a rigorous pipeline and real grading. Without it, you get the exact impression you were trying to avoid: actors standing in front of a screen.

The wall dictates your optics. Distance to the LED panels and depth of field are not free choices — stop down too far and you resolve the pixel structure, or invite moiré. In practice you often work with faster glass and shallower focus than the scene might otherwise want. That is a real constraint on framing, not a footnote.

The lighting problem becomes harder, not easier. Physical foreground light must match the virtual background precisely, or the illusion collapses. The technology does not remove the cinematographer's judgement. It raises the cost of getting it wrong.

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The honest conclusion

Virtual Production is not the future of everything. It is a precise instrument that solves a specific set of problems extremely well and adds friction everywhere else.

For a producer, the useful question is not whether the technology is impressive. It is whether this particular script has scenes where controlled light, controlled time, or an unreachable location are what stands between the budget and the vision. Sometimes the answer is clearly yes. More often it is no — and knowing which is worth more than any amount of enthusiasm for the tool.

If you are weighing this workflow for an upcoming production, I am glad to look at the script and give you a straight answer on whether it fits — creatively and budgetarily.

Nicklas Karpaty, FSF — Director of Photography info@nicklaskarpaty.com

Thanks to Stockholm VP Studio, Storyline, and Michael Petersen, FSF, for behind-the-scenes footage and stills.