Demystifying the Use of Compression in Virtual Production

Virtual Production (VP) technologies enhance on-set filming and live concerts through high-resolution, high-brightness LED panels. Due to technical challenges like synchronization and color balancing, the industry prefers resource-intensive lossless compression for displays. Modern lossy standards (AV1, H.265) could maintain quality while reducing resource demands, yet no agreed methodology exists for assessing their in-camera impact. We present a method comparing lossless and lossy compressed footage displayed through VP screens and recorded in-camera. Our assessment compares HAP/NotchLC/Daniel2 intermediate codecs with hardware Nvidia Encoders (NVENC) using AV1/HEVC/H.264 compression at bitrates from 2–2000 Mbit/s with various GOP sizes using different perceptual quality metrics. Results demonstrate hybrid codecs achieve equivalent quality to intermediate encoders at significantly lower bitrates and storage requirements.