Virtual production is a room-by-room decision, not a Hollywood one

Every conversation about virtual production starts in the same place: the LED wall. The Mandalorian volume. A budget with more zeros than most Welsh production companies will see in a decade. Then the conversation stops, because the picture in everyone’s head is a picture of something they cannot afford.

We think that picture is wrong, and we have spent the last two years trying to prove it.

A three-metre room

In October 2024 we set up a test studio for our Media Cymru research project. It measured three metres by three. People told us, politely, that nothing meaningful could happen in a space that size. That was the point. If virtual production only works at the scale of a film studio, then it is a film-studio tool and the rest of us should stop pretending. If it works in a small room, it is a technique, and techniques scale.

It worked in the small room. Camera tracking, live keying, real-time environments, final pixels on the monitor. Not a proof of concept: a working pipeline that fits in a unit on a business park.

The wrong question about cost

Ben Tilbrook at Mo-Sys asked us a question during the project that we have not stopped thinking about. Is cost-effective how cheap you can make the set-up, or how much you save on the production?

Most of the industry answers the first version and never gets to the second. The set-up cost is visible, so it dominates. The savings are spread across every shoot after it: no location fees, no weather days, no travel, no waiting for post to tell you whether the shot works. The director sees the finished frame while the actor is still on the mark. That is not a nice-to-have. It is where the money is.

Build it like a house

The lesson from the small room is that virtual production does not have to be all or nothing. Start with tracking and a keyer. Add a real-time environment. Add a wall when the work justifies it. Each room you add makes the next one cheaper, because the pipeline and the crew already exist.

That is how we built VEDRI, and it is how we think most Welsh studios should think about it: not as a leap, but as a set of decisions you can make one at a time. The technology stopped being the barrier a while ago. The picture in everyone’s head is the barrier now.