Not a week goes by without someone asking us: “Why didn’t you go with an LED volume?”
It’s a fair question. LED volumes are the headline technology in virtual production right now. They look incredible in behind-the-scenes reels, they’ve been used on some of the biggest shows in the world, and the in-camera visual effects they produce are genuinely impressive. So when we were designing the vedrí pipeline at DocShed in Gwynedd, we had to make a real decision — not a default one.
We chose real-time green screen compositing. Here’s why, and what we think it means for studios at our scale.
What an LED Volume Actually Gives You
Before we explain our choice, it’s worth being honest about what LED volumes do well. An LED volume wraps the set in high-resolution LED panels displaying a 3D environment rendered in real time — usually by Unreal Engine running on a cluster of powerful GPUs. As the camera moves, the virtual background shifts perspective to match, creating a convincing sense of depth and parallax. The lighting from the screens wraps around the talent naturally, and reflective surfaces — glass, metal, wet skin — pick up the virtual environment in a way that looks physically correct.
The result is that you can capture a finished-looking shot in-camera, with minimal compositing needed in post. For large-scale productions with the budget and crew to support it, that’s a genuine advantage.
The Realities at Our Scale
Here’s the thing, though. An LED volume isn’t just a screen you plug in. The hardware cost for even a modest volume — say, a 270-degree curved wall at a usable pixel pitch — runs into hundreds of thousands of pounds. Then you need a media server (typically from Disguise or Brompton), a render cluster, a colour-calibrated pipeline to match the LED panels to your camera’s colour science, and a crew trained to operate all of it.
Day rates for LED volume studios in London typically start around £8,000-£15,000. That’s before you factor in content creation for the virtual environments, pre-production time for technical scouts, and the specialised crew you need on the day.
At vedrí, we wanted to build something accessible. A studio where a filmmaker or agency could walk in with a concept and walk out with footage that looks like it was shot on location — without needing a six-figure budget or a crew of twenty.
How Our Green Screen Pipeline Works
Our approach uses a green screen cyclorama with real-time compositing powered by Unreal Engine and Mo-Sys camera tracking. The Mo-Sys StarTracker Max mounted on our Blackmagic Pyxis 6K feeds sub-pixel-accurate positional data into Unreal Engine via M·Path, so the virtual background tracks the camera’s position and orientation in real time — just like an LED volume does.
The difference is in how we display the composite. Instead of showing the environment on physical LED panels around the talent, we composite the green screen feed with the Unreal Engine output in real time and send the result to on-set monitors. The director, the client, and the talent can all see a close-to-final composite as we shoot.
Is it identical to an LED volume? No. We don’t get the automatic environmental reflections on shiny surfaces, and our lighting team needs to match the virtual environment manually rather than relying on light spilling off LED panels. But for the vast majority of corporate, commercial, and independent film work, the visual difference in the final output is negligible — especially once you’re in the grade.
What This Means for Our Clients
The practical upside is significant. Our day rate is a fraction of what an LED volume facility charges. We can turn around environment changes in minutes rather than requiring days of pre-production. A client can show up with reference images in the morning and be shooting against a matching virtual environment by lunchtime.
There’s also a flexibility advantage that doesn’t get talked about enough. With green screen compositing, you’re not locked into the final background at the point of shooting. If the client changes their mind about the environment in post — different city, different time of day, different colour palette — we have that option. With an LED volume, what you see on the wall is essentially what you get.
For a small, independent studio in North Wales serving a mix of agencies, filmmakers, and brands, that combination of affordability and flexibility is exactly the right trade-off.
We’re Not Anti-LED
To be clear: we’re not saying LED volumes are overhyped. They’re brilliant technology, and for the right project at the right budget, they’re the best tool for the job. If you’re shooting a feature film with extensive reflective costumes and need pixel-perfect environmental interaction on every surface, an LED volume is hard to beat.
But the narrative that LED volumes are the only way to do virtual production — that green screen is somehow the old way — misses the point. The core of virtual production is real-time rendering and camera tracking. How you display the result is an implementation detail, and different implementations suit different contexts.
We think there’s a huge opportunity for studios like ours — smaller, leaner, regional — to bring virtual production to projects that would never have the budget for an LED volume stage. And from our base at DocShed in Gwynedd, that’s exactly what we’re doing.
What’s Next
We’re currently running tests on real-time reflection passes — using secondary render layers from Unreal Engine to add convincing environmental reflections onto talent in post, bridging one of the gaps between our green screen approach and a full LED volume. Early results are promising. We’ll write that up once we’ve nailed the workflow.
If you’re weighing up green screen versus LED volume for your next project, feel free to book a studio visit — we’re happy to walk you through both approaches honestly and help you figure out what makes sense for your brief and your budget.
This Fortnight in VP
PIER59 Studios launches Megaverse — a fully integrated VP, XR, and live events ecosystem — New York’s PIER59 is going big with the largest LED screen in the northeast US. Interesting to see VP and live events converging under one roof.
Unreal Engine 5.7 released with expanded VP workflows — The new Live Link Broadcast Component lets UE act as an animation data source across your network, which opens up multi-machine VP stage setups. Substrate is now production-ready too, meaning more physically accurate materials for virtual environments.
Dallas College opens Vū virtual production soundstage — More educational institutions investing in VP training. Good for the industry — more trained crew coming through the pipeline means more accessible productions.
40% of media executives now using VP tools, per Altman Solon survey — The stat that caught our eye: over half expect to adopt VP within 18-24 months. The demand curve is clearly pointing upward, especially in corporate and enterprise comms.
