Moiré

Once again Industrial Light and Magic rocks the world of visual effects with the production of The Mandalorian using the new virtual production technology. It has sent shock waves through the VFX community and worries many of my fellow compositors about the future of our jobs. After all, shots that would have normally been done as a green screen are now captured in-camera without compositing. Over 50 percent of The Mandalorian Season 1 was filmed using this new methodology and this scares the pudding out of my fellow pixel practitioners. As of this writing, there are 10 virtual sets in production with roughly another 100 underway all around the world. Is this the end of our careers? Are we soon to be as obsolete as CRTs? Will industry-standard tools like Nuke, Resolve, Silhouette, or Mocha go the way of the Dodo? The short answer is “no!” The long answer is “hell no!”