You guys are not gonna believe we just got the RTX 5090
and I'm about to risk it up to unbox this product
that looks really interesting.
And I, wait a second, where am I?
Oh, oh, I know this is the new set for Game Linked.
This looks amazing.
We're doing a gaming news channel guys.
We've got all these lights and we got the big G
and this is huge.
How did we afford all of this?
A lot more easily than you would think.
In fact, this entire setup is so cheap
that I'm starting to wonder
if I even need a big studio like this
that I'm not even standing in front of.
Now these days, anyone can key out a background
with pretty good results,
but the keen-eyed among you might've noticed something
that is more than just pretty good.
How on earth did we manage to move the camera around
inside of our new set?
Follow me and I'll show you.
The tech is just on the other side of this tunnel.
Let's go.
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We're finally launching our new gaming news channel
Game Linked, but we have two big problems to solve.
The first is space.
To give the channel a clear identity,
we wanted it to have its own set, but look around.
We don't have space for another large set
like we built for Tech Linked.
I mean, we could just use the green screen
that we already have, but that leads to our second issue,
time.
We want to solve a long-standing problem.
Linus, stop, Linus, stop, it's Tech Linked.
Time for Tech Linked.
Yeah, we got pods.
What is this doing here?
Where we can't shoot anything there
while they're shooting there,
and we can't shoot anything here
while they're shooting there, it's infuriating.
All right, just cut, break for Tech Linked.
This is the kind of thing
that wastes a ton of production time around here.
And the issue is compounded by the fact
that adding green screens
creates a lot of extra work for our editors.
Our tech news show, Tech Linked,
is produced entirely in a single day,
and the current workflow often requires the team
to work into the evening to get it out on time.
The solution?
Moving our green screen over here,
or, well, more accurately, adding a second green screen.
Now, Tech Linked and Game Linked
never have to wait for our other videos or vice versa,
and we get to maintain clear channel identities
without acquiring more expensive Vancouver real estate.
Nice.
Except for one small problem.
Quality green screen work is still more complex
than simply taking out the green
and putting in the other stuff.
You can end up with all sorts of wonky artifacts
that will make your composite look like crap.
For example, any green in your clothing
can end up being keyed out, like this news anchor's dress,
or you can have color spill
from the reflected green light on the set
that makes your subject look anemic.
Blocky cutouts can eliminate fine details,
like flyaway hairs,
and you can end up with weird, unnatural blur
as the key struggles to compensate
for the motion blur on a moving subject.
And of course, if there are any shadows on the set,
then the color filter might not be able to select the key.
And that's just the basic problems.
All of these need to be fixed
after the fact by a video editor,
meaning that any time we gained
from shooting simultaneously
gets thrown out the window later on
in the production pipeline is what I used to say.
See, here's the thing.
Big TV stations and production houses
have had tools like this one for,
whoa, God, that's on wheels.
Cool.
As I was saying, big TV stations and production houses
have had tools like this for decades,
but it's only recently that boxes like this one
have gotten affordable.
Meet the Blackmagic Ultimatte 4K.
This little wonder costs less
than an Apple Vision Pro headset
and allows us to live composite our video footage,
which takes all of the extra post-production work
out of the process.
How well?
Let me tell you, actually, let me show you,
because I think that's gonna be
an easier way of understanding
as we explore the software and give you some examples.
Hi, Ed.
Hi.
I don't have the Ultimatte software.
It's over there.
Cool, one moment, please.
This looks so mind-blowingly good.
Look at these little hairs.
There's no green around them.
If I wasn't looking at this right now,
I would have no idea that, okay, how does this work?
I mean, technically speaking,
I don't actually know how it works.
Okay, how is it doing this?
No, for real, though.
Minus, it's a green screen.
It takes out the green.
Yes, I know it takes out the green,
but the reflections internally on that thing,
whatever hardware-accelerated trickery they're using,
the base concept is like any other green screen.
So we look at the raw input coming out of the camera,
we select a color value that we want to remove or key out,
and then, using the power of compositing,
we put our lovely host into a virtual set.
That's kind of the easy part these days.
I mean, even your smartphone can make fake backgrounds
for TikTok filters.
The cool part is remember all those issues
I mentioned before, like color spill and sloppy cutouts?
We can resolve them right on device
before it ever gets recorded.
Can you show me raw?
Because this looks pretty good right now.
All right, so let's start from the beginning.
We will capture, Andy, hold on, don't move.
There's a lot of green or like noise.
Why is that?
Because those parts of the green screen
are not perfectly lit and don't match our green value.
It's either hotter than the rest of the green screen
or darker.
Okay, that's bad.
Yeah, I mean, that's bad.
You're gonna run into that without spending a ton of time
and money with more lights.
Every time, always on about the budget.
Now we've got this noise,
but using a setting called veil,
we can just tell it, see you later, buddy.
And this is essentially in a normal green screen process,
you were saying it's like black clipping or white clipping?
Yeah, it's essentially crushing the whites or blacks
so that there's no in between.
The fuzz that you were seeing were gray.
So we don't want this gray.
We wanna clean all black on Andy,
all white on the green screen.
Yeah, so if I turn off the veil settings here,
you can see that you got in and out of gray there.
The tricky part about chroma keying,
and this has existed forever,
is that it's a balance of taking things away,
but also keeping the things that you want in there.
Right.
And when you adjust something like veil,
it's flipping the whites or blacks.
When something is in the gray here naturally, like hair,
that can get lost, yeah.
Okay, but we can fix that.
Yes.
Ah, good.
I mean, like right now, it's looking pretty good.
We have some buzz because we've taken a bit too much.
Your hair is the worst to handle for this.
So what I'm looking for is different angles
to see if there are any issues cropping up,
especially on the edges of his head where the hair,
you know, likes to be wispy and stick out.
They're very likely to get cut out and look just blocky.
That's actually really good.
I'm convinced.
What else do we need to adjust?
Realistically, with what this is looking like right now,
we don't have to change anything.
Yeah, play around with some stuff to change though.
We want to show off the software.
One thing we can adjust here,
because our screen is actually not perfect.
It's wrinkly and it's not perfectly lit in the corners.
You can see that here showing up.
Yeah.
And we would use shadow threshold to get rid of that.
What that's doing is-
Oh.
Shadow compensation.
It's very similar to veil.
It's just setting a point where anything that's brighter
than this be white.
But if we were to overdo that,
could we end up with, you know,
a reflection off of Andy's skin turning background color?
Too much and it turns like that.
Yeah, that's really yucky.
Yeah, let's bring back 30s Andy.
There's a vast number of other parameters
that we can adjust here,
depending on the complexity of our production.
You can see Ed's doing a little bit of skin tone correction,
a little bit of color correction.
It can do that in hardware.
It can also handle spill correction.
So if Andy was standing on a green floor as well,
he'd obviously have a lot more green light
reflecting on him.
We can compensate for that.
It can even add his shadow back in.
So it can find where his shadow would be
from the studio lighting on the green floor,
key out the green floor,
but leave that shadow in place on the final composite.
Now, once the settings are dialed in,
what's great about this is we can just shoot
and send the composite off to the editor who edits it
as if it wasn't shot on a green screen in the first place.
That is super cool and could save us a ton of time.
Like even with lighting changes,
it should work pretty well because it has a feature
where it captures just the background
so that anything that isn't the background gets left in.
You might think, hey, then what's the point
of chroma keying?
I'm not sure because they don't really explain that.
Okay, so what's happening now?
So what's happening is it took that capture, right?
Yeah.
And is saying, okay, this is the green screen.
So anything not this is supposed to be keyed out.
So you basically get a plate of your green screen
and tell it, hey, that's what it's supposed to look like.
Yeah.
That is amazing.
Using the green screen capture
and then using the difference mode, right?
Yeah.
And going, okay, so this is the difference.
Don't keep it, don't keep it.
So if you're on a static background,
actually your background could be just about anything.
See, I think that's how that should work.
Purple screen.
They don't say it.
I mean, can we try it?
Can you just turn that camera a few degrees to me?
Does it need to be locked off?
Okay.
Yeah, so just turn it over here.
Oh my goodness.
Okay, so then yeah, I'll move and then do the thing.
And then I go back in.
Okay, that does not work very well.
Better, like it works better than I thought it would.
But that doesn't explain how we moved around
inside of our virtual set earlier.
This is super cool.
Instead of building a set and then shooting a plate
or a static 2D shot to put our host in front of,
the game link set was designed in Unreal Engine,
meaning that like in a video game,
you can render it from any angle
simply by moving your virtual camera.
The big trick then is to match the movement
of the virtual camera to the real one.
Now in the past, this required meticulous planning
and choreography between the film crews
and the post-production teams.
But recent advancements allow us to track our camera motion
and then export that 3D movement data
directly into Unreal Engine.
The baller way to do this
is with a giant high resolution video wall
like on the Mandalorian.
But ain't nobody got money for that.
Fortunately, virtual production has blown up
into a massive market and the leftover chum
from the sharks at the top starting to trickle down
to us little deep sea guppies.
Instead of requiring a massive high resolution screen,
we can use their Unreal Engine tricks
to make a high tech set
that can pack away into an LTT backpack.
But how do we get the camera movement from the real world
translated into our virtual world?
Did you spot of these QR code looking things earlier?
They're alignment markers.
To make a convincing composite,
it's imperative that you match the camera's movement
with the backdrop perfectly.
And to do that,
you have to establish an exact starting position.
Then from there,
there are a number of different ways
to track the physical camera's movement
from that starting position.
The ideal solution would be to make use
of Vive Mars trackers.
These are essentially the third generation
Vive body trackers that folks have been using
for full body tracking and applications like VRChat.
What makes these ones special
is that they hook up to a special transmitter
that sends data to a monitor
and allows you to sync time code with your camera
so that your motion data and your shots
are temporally and physically aligned.
The downside is the kit costs $5,000.
Fortunately, there are cheaper solutions.
In fact, you might even be holding one
in your hand right now.
Apple's AR kit allows us to use the myriad sensors
on the iPhone to slam or simultaneous localization
and mapping.
In a nutshell, by attaching this to our camera rig,
we can collect accurate motion data for our camera.
If you're an Android user,
you may also be able to take advantage of ARCore,
but we can't speak to how well that works.
We ended up using an iPhone.
Now that we have our tracking data,
we can export that and import it into Unreal Engine
as movement for our virtual camera.
To really sell the illusion,
you also need to match all of your camera settings,
so your focal length, your lens size, et cetera.
You line up the movement with your set,
and then you end up with what we showed off in our intro.
Not gonna lie.
While this 3D camera position matching
can be done in real time,
we set out to build a workflow
for a biweekly YouTube news show.
So everything you're seeing now was done in post,
but we just wanted to show off what could be done
on a budget of a sheet of green cloth,
an iPhone, and a computer.
But even though we'll be sticking
with a static camera for game length, at least for now,
I'm sure we're gonna find some opportunities
to use these new capabilities, and who knows?
Maybe you will too.
Like, how cool would it be
if we wanted to film at sunrise whenever we wanted to?
Oh, speaking of which, it's day that it is,
which means game length will be posted soon.
Quick, go subscribe to the new channel.
Everyone's gonna be there,
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If you enjoyed this video, go check out Game Linked,
or if you're more into the tech side of things,
check out the time we shot a 500 megapixel photo.
That's a lot of megapixels.