The Doctor Who 60th-anniversary specials have used Mo-Sys’ automated re-rendering service NearTime for on-set virtual production to deliver the show’s VFX scenes.
NearTime offers a dual workflow which enables automated Unreal Engine re-rendering in the cloud. Tracking data is re-rendered with background plates and delivered back with increased quality and/or resolution in the same VFX delivery window while making on-set renders available for real-time feedback.
Boutique studio Painting Practice and VFX specialists RealTime approached Mo-Sys in 2022 to form a new workflow for last week’s particularly VFX-heavy special episode of the show.
James Uren, Mo-Sys technical director explained: “This ambitious diamond anniversary Doctor Who special was set to have more than 250 VFX shots, meaning traditional VFX approaches would be cost-prohibitive. So, we had to think differently.”
The project aimed to take pre-visualisations created by Painting Practice in Unreal Engine onto set with the real camera.
RealTime and Mo-Sys had recently collaborated on Netflix production Dance Monsters, where six cameras and eight monster characters were combined in real-time – also using Unreal Engine and Mo-Sys VP Pro, to film it as a live light-entertainment show.
Mo-Sys and RealTime developed a pipeline for transferring the precision camera and lens tracking data from Mo-Sys StarTracker through to post production, to help automate and speed up the VFX workload.
The companies put pre-visualisation, on-set camera tracking, real-time pre-viz, NearTime rendering and automated VFX pipelines together to deliver the episode at fraction of the cost of traditional VFX, said Mo-Sys.
