Generative A.I. on the Volume… tamed by Pro Data

WPP’s Creative Tech Apprenticeship recently partnered with NVIDIA, using cutting-edge generative AI to build worlds for virtual production on a volume at ARRI Stage in London. Seven cameras generated a staggering amount of data, all captured seamlessly on two iodyne Pro Data units on set. Let’s take a look at the details of this data workflow.

Industry heavy-weights elevating the next generation of creative minds.

Global advertising company WPP teamed with NVIDIA on their annual apprenticeship program, tasking recent college grads to propose a video game for one of WPP’s clients, such as Coca-Cola and Ford Motor Company. As the end-of-year project, the apprentices had to create a trailer for a game. WPP’s NVIDIA-powered generative AI built conceptual scenes. Then, for two weeks, the creative apprentices took over the ARRI Stage in London, feeding these scenes into Unreal Engine and putting AI-generated worlds into a 12,960 x 2160 resolution volume. Director and DOP Brett Danton of NM Productions used two new Canon EOS C400 Cinema Cameras to bring the students’ visions to life. In addition, five other cameras were constantly rolling, capturing all of this as BTS, showing how the apprentices were working, brainstorming, and executing. 

A score of industry leaders stepped up for this impressive engineering feat, pulling it off without problems. iodyne Pro Data was the backbone of this massive data capture, performing flawlessly under the pressure of this proof-of-concept AI virtual production workflow.

A beastly data workflow.

This project called for a solid A/B cam set-up and multi-cam BTS ingest, and Pro Data handled it all.

• First, WPP and NVIDIA generated AI scenes from existing CG assets, which were then fed to Epic Games’ Unreal Engine. 
• A Megapixel Helios drove the LEDs by taking the image from Unreal and processing it for the volume. 
• Renderboxes’ custom edition of Molecule Air multi-GPU workstation seamlessly integrated into this live link with housing 16x NVIDIA RTX 6000 ADA graphics cards—all within a single unit. 
• Simultaneously, the Atomos Ultrasync One box synced the wall to all the cameras: two new Canon EOS C400s working as A/B cameras and one Canon C500 Mark II.
• And four C70s serving as BTS cams rolling all the time. 
• Cards from the C400s and C500 were offloaded via Sonnet CFExpress Dual readers, with the remaining C70s using two SD readers. 
• All five card readers were plugged into a Mac Studio, which deployed a BlackMagic UltraStudio 4K video processing box to an ASUS monitor to compare with a multi-view video feed live off the cameras. 

Pro Data, the steady sleek data tool that can handle the influx

This is where Pro Data showed up to the party, called on to flex its industry-leading nimbleness and reliability. 

• The Mac Studio ran Hedge Offshoot, ingesting this tsunami of data onto two Pro Data 24TB RAID-6 solid-state drives.
• One of the Pro Datas used ChronoSync to archive a copy of all the data to a spinning HDD RAID.
• The second Pro Data concurrently created proxies from the RAW files with BlackMagic Proxy Generator via a watch folder. 
• Those proxies were synced to BlackMagic Resolve Cloud, which the editor, working remotely in Cornwall, England, could immediately access on his PC running DaVinci Resolve on Windows. 
• Meanwhile, Renderboxes’ Atom dual GPU workstation and the Pro Data facilitated smooth data processing at blistering speeds. 
• Upon wrap, one of the Pro Data units traveled to the editor’s studio, and was used to link the proxies back to the RAW source files. 

 

In addition, director Brett Danton started cutting the footage off one of the Pro Datas immediately, taking advantage of its portable form factor and lightning quickness: “This was the busiest we’ve ever been,” Danton said. “Normally, a 24TB drive would be a really big drive to bring along, and a smaller drive wouldn’t be fast enough to work on; it takes too long to find the footage. No smaller form factor can work with RAW files.

With Pro Data I could take the RAID on the train with me, which I normally can never do. I could start editing on the train.

Ben Colson, Digital Operator and DIT on the project, weighed in on how Pro Data can serve as a game changer with the massive data involved in virtual production: “Everything’s been great with the units! We’re running both in RAID 6 APFS with a single container on each.”

Walking off set this evening with a copy of the whole job in the laptop sleeve of my backpack vs a 6-8 disk RAID array was a very welcome change.”

With fast data needs evolving daily, Pro Data is becoming the go-to data workflow tool for complex undertakings like virtual production environments, providing rock-solid peak performance even under the heaviest fire. 

Related Projects

Check out Pro Data’s recent role behind the scenes on the virtual production set for the ETS project “Europa.” See on our Instagram.

Explore how dystopian Sci-Fi “Fathead” was brought to life through virtual production with Pro Data backstopping it all. Read here.

Watch cinematographer, VFX supervisor, and Stargate Studios Founder, Sam Nicholson, ASC’s take on virtual production in Ep 1 of iodyne Creator Series. Watch on our YouTube channel.

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