What is Virtual Production, XR and LED for Film?
THESAURUS FOR LED TECHNOLOGY
Terminology used for Virtual Production, xR, and Film
New technology often comes with a new set of terminology. To guide your way into the what-is-what of LED technology for virtual production we Ledecolor have complied this easy and no-nonsense thesaurus. Read it below or download it here:
Live LED wall
A live LED wall is any LED wall used for virtual production where the content is displayed during the camera shoots.
LED display resolution
The number of distinct pixels in the respective dimension that can be displayed, generally mentioned as pixel per width × height, is the LED display resolution.
The driver IC will control the LED. It will generate the PWM signals to have the LEDs display the required brightness. The modern driver IC’s use many advanced technologies to get the best possible performance out of the LED.
The receiver card is the link between the LED processor (with video input) and the driver ICs (connected to the LEDs, video output). Except for decoding and distributing the video signal, the Receiver card will do a lot of extra corrections, such as brightness, gamma, calibration, etc.
Refresh rate is how many times per second a frame is redrawn on the display. (Typically, 1920, 3840, 7680Hz)
Scan rate, also named scan mux or multiplexing. One driver IC output pin drives multiple LEDs. This is done by completing the circuit for each LED one by one (multiplexing). During one refresh cycle, all the LEDs will light up once. Typical scan rates are 16:1, 11:1, 8:1
Frame rate is the number of frames per second. This is typically determined by the video source. (Typically, 24, 50, 60Hz)
Scan lines is the effect your eyes or the camera pick up when the refresh rate is too low. A camera is more sensitive than our eyes to pick up scanlines. Typically higher refresh rates are desirable and genlocking (synching) the refresh rates between the screen and camera may be needed.
COB technology is a method to package the LED chip directly on the module.
GOB Technology is an innovative method to seal the LED packages on the module surface with epoxy glue.
A special mask fitted to the LED panel or LEDs on the panel reduces the moiré-effect.
The angle at which a display can be viewed with acceptable visual performance. In other words, the luminous intensity measured at right angles to the surface of the LED chip, a measure of the position where the intensity of the LED light spread reaches 50% of its maximum brightness. The illumination continues past the edge of the viewing angle but continues to decrease in intensity.
Brightness is expressed in nits. A nit is a unit of measurement of luminance, or the intensity of visible light, where one nit is equal to one candela per square meter (CD/M2). The higher number of nits, the brighter the screen.
Video or image jitter occurs when the horizontal lines of video image frames are randomly displaced due to the corruption of synchronization signals or electromagnetic interference during video transmission. Jitter can cause a display monitor to flicker.
Reflection is the mirroring effect of light on surfaces (like an LED).
The shift in color when looking at the LED screen under an angle, is due to the placement of the LED diodes (red, green, blue) in the LED package.
Bit Depth, aka Color Depth, describes the amount of information stored in each pixel of data. As you increase bit depth, you also increase the number of colors that can be represented. In the case of an 8-bit image, each pixel has 8-bits of data per color (RGB), so for each color channel the pixel has 28 = 256 possible variations. 10-bit would give 210 = 1024 color variations and 12-bit 212 = 4096.
IMD (Integrated Mounted Devices) technology (N-in-1) integrates two, four or six sets of RGB lamp beads into one small unit.
Genlocks, generator locking, is the technique that is used to synchronize video signals, coming out of a signal generator or similar source, to the other picture resources. Genlock technology is widely used in video applications. One of the most common genlock applications is to synchronize cameras. Genlock is used to sync video signal or pixels to an external synchronization source, while synchronizing the SDI output to an external source, the SDI refresh rate is determined with the help of a sync source.