Brompton Technology’s LED processing is powering The Next Stage, the largest filmmaking infrastructure in southern France.
Based at Provence Studios, the studio features a U-shaped volume with an LED ceiling, as well as a mobile set-up.
The Next Stage has been created by La Planète Rouge. The team spent a year on R&D, working with various manufacturers to decide on the best solution. “Because of this, and the fact that we are the owner of our own, cost-effective, LED panels, we could test everything thoroughly,” said La Planète Rouge’s Morgann Brun.
The team’s collaboration with Brompton and ArtBox was instrumental in the R&D stage. ArtBox invested in its own Hydra camera, enabling it to get the most out of its panels with Brompton’s Dynamic Calibration technology enabling greater brightness, improved colour gamut and the ability to display HDR imagery.
The U-shaped volume features a 2.5 pitch ArtBox LED wall, with each of the three sections measuring 14m by 6m high, along with a motorised roof spanning 8m by 8m, and one 5m by 2.5m mobile setup, all of which totals around 50 million pixels. “Our production control room is equipped with 10 Brompton Tessera SX40 LED processors, offering 12-bit HDR rendering on the LED wall with a frame rate of up to 200fps for slow motion,” added Brun.
The studio employs nine servers that render in real-time using a disguise system, Unreal Engine 5.3, a Sony FX9 camera, and an NVIDIA A6000 and RTX 4090 graphics card, which allows the creation of hyper-realistic, immersive virtual environments.
“We wanted The Next Stage to be compared to the established LA studios and we think we’ve done that,” said Brun. “A lot of companies come to us because we’re in the South of France, and being located within the larger filmmaking facilities is certainly advantageous for them. The Next Stage becomes a valuable asset that complements the rest of the production.”
The volume has already been used by productions from Warner Bros and Paramount, French as well as feature films and TV films, TV series and commercials.
