Two big LED stories landed this week — and both quietly argue that VP is about matching the tool to the shot, not chasing the biggest wall.
Every few months a new “world’s largest” LED volume gets announced, and every time the same question lands in our inbox: should we be shooting on something like that? This week it was a 132 × 16 ft 360-degree car-process volume on Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day. It’s a brilliant piece of engineering. It is also, for almost every project we’re asked about, the wrong answer.
That isn’t a dig at big volumes. It’s a point about fit. The most interesting thing in this week’s news is how deliberately the successful builds were sized for the shot.
The screens were the hero — but only where the shot needed it
On Disclosure Day, 4Wall Entertainment built three separate environments rather than one monster stage: a command centre of ten LED surfaces built into the scenery, a small interactive weather screen for a newsroom set, and a purpose-built car-process volume. Zachary Sager of 4Wall put it neatly: the screens were the hero, not a background extension.
Notice what that isn’t. It isn’t a single wall that does everything. Each build was shaped around one specific job — and the car process is a good example, because a vehicle chase needs a wraparound volume and tracked, dynamic camera work in a way that a talking-head interview simply doesn’t.
The same message came out of the CinemaTech summit in Beijing, where VP Nordic’s Rasmus Eriksson talked about configuring LED volumes around specific shot requirements rather than maximising stage size. That’s the sensible position, and we’d go further: the first question in any VP project should be “what does the camera actually need to see?”, not “how big can we go?”
Where we land, and why
We work on a green screen stage with real-time compositing as our core capability: Unreal Engine for the environments, a Mo-Sys StarTracker Max on a 15mm rod rail feeding camera position, a Blackmagic Pyxis 6K, and the composite visible on Rec 709 monitors as we shoot. And we’re upfront that LED isn’t always the answer for us either — when a project needs in-camera light wrap or a fast run of backdrops, we hire in and manage an LED stage.
The difference between the two comes down to a few honest trade-offs:
Camera count. An LED volume typically gives you one or two tracked frustums. Green screen composites every angle at once. A three-camera podcast or panel is a green screen job, full stop.
Scene count. Eight scenes in a day suits swapping backgrounds on a compositor. One or two high-fidelity cinematic scenes suit an LED wall.
Parallax. If the background must move correctly with a handheld or Steadicam camera, tracking and an Unreal-driven wall earn their cost. If the camera is locked off or on a slider, they mostly don’t.
Budget certainty. A stage you own has a predictable day rate. Hire-ins, crew and transport add variables.
None of that is as exciting as a record-breaking wall. But it’s the conversation that saves a client money, and it’s the same logic the big builds are quietly applying.
If you want the practical side of how our own pipeline gets ready before shoot day, we wrote it up in Five Days to a Virtual Set. And if you’re weighing up lighting on a composite, Lighting for the Composite covers how we match talent to a virtual world.
What’s Next
We’re spending the next few weeks stress-testing hybrid days — green screen for the multi-camera coverage, a hired-in LED stage for one or two hero moments — and working out where the cleanest hand-off between the two colour pipelines sits. We’ll write up what we learn, including the bits that didn’t work.
If you’re trying to decide between approaches for your own project, book a studio visit — we’re happy to walk you through the options in person, and we’ll tell you honestly when the answer is “you don’t need the big wall”.
This Fortnight in VP
Spielberg’s Disclosure Day turns to 4Wall, Absen, Brompton and Disguise for three bespoke LED builds — A 132 × 16 ft car-process volume sits alongside much smaller, scene-specific screens, which shows that even blockbuster VP is about right-sizing, not just scale.
AOTO brings creators and technology together at CITS 2026 — The summit’s “AI + XR” theme and VP Nordic’s talk on configuring volumes per shot are a useful reminder that the craft decisions matter more than the spec sheet.
IBC 2026: the biggest broadcast, production and AV technology announcements — ROE Visual’s new Sirius frequency-tunable LED driver is aimed squarely at camera-to-display performance, which is exactly where flicker and banding trouble starts on set.
