‘Doctor Who’ celebrates its 60th anniversary by integrating VP rendering on set with Mo-Sys

NearTime, automated rendering service for virtual production (VP) on set Mon-Sys, has been used by the production team of the science fiction series 'Doctor Who' (BBC).

The special of 60th anniversary of Doctor Who has been executed from the technical side by Painting Practice. This study boutique specialized in CGI, animation and visual effects in real time worked intensely for months to make the production team's vision of British fiction a reality. This is how he explains it James Hours, Mo-Sys technical director: "This ambitious Dr. Who diamond anniversary special was going to feature over 250 visual effects shots, which meant that traditional visual effects methods would be cost-prohibitive. So we had to come up with an alternative."

RealTime had recently been used in the Netflix production Dance Monsters, where 6 cameras and 8 monster characters were combined in real time using the Unreal engine and Mo-Sys VP Pro. Building on this development, Mo-Sys developed a pipeline to transfer precision camera and lens tracking data from Mo-Sys StarTracker through post-production, to help automate and dramatically accelerate the VFX workload.

Once the workflow was perfected, Painting Practice was able to apply NearTime in the production of the special. Doctor Who. The solution offered a dual workflow that enabled automated rendering of Unreal in the cloud. Tracking data is rendered with background plates and returned at higher quality and resolution in the same VFX delivery window, while on-set renders are available for real-time feedback.

In this way, the combination of preview, on-set camera tracking, real-time preview, rendering NearTime and the automated visual effects pipelines made it possible to complete this special “with impressive visual effects at a fraction of the cost of traditional visual effects,” as Mo-Sys itself points out.

https://youtu.be/tEkC6InjWQ8