We Tested Sci-Fi Movie Tech (feat. MKBHD)

"OHHHH" "That's insane!!" Today I'm testing out some insane tech and  seeing how movies really get made. But hold on, let me start from the beginning... [REWIND] Okay. Think of your favorite movie. Have you ever seen how they filmed it?  There's a chance that it looked pretty... weird. The tech behind how they make movies these  days has exploded in complexity and realism. And it's not just HollywoodI It's gotten to the point  where I could be watching a YouTube video and not be totally sure wha

t's real... and what's not. I'm not in my studio right now, I am in a warehouse full of the tech behind my favorite movies. Today I'm at ZeroSpace studios in New York with Marques Brownlee who knows a thing or two about dope tech. "The old rules about how media gets made are basically rewritten. You  can do whatever you want!" ZeroSpace has given us full access to their warehouse full of amazing movie-making toys. We're gonna get to try out three truly wild tech tools that are changing  how movi

es get made. And we're gonna explore how you and we can use them. "This might be a very expensive day for me..." "Let's do it!" "Hey everyone! If you want to come over here... that'd be really helpful... Hello Cleo and Marques, thank you for coming to hang out with us today we're super excited to have you all out here..." The first tool that we get to play with is taking  green screen to the next level. Welcome to the XR stage. In its simplest form, an XR stage is a giant  LED wall that lets you

display whatever you want on it, which is what you saw me doing at the start  of this video. Here we are setting up that fake studio trick that we tried to pull on you: This is my perspective just on my phone of what's going on right now... Maybe one of the reveal takes that we  should have is you just - I just walk in? [Laughing] I'm like lost, what's going? Oh, I'm in the wrong video, sorry... Marques pulled a similar trick on his channel... Is this rolling already? Hey what's up MKBHD here, 

welcome back to Dope Tech... So what would you use this for? We would just design awesome sets over  and over again behind us... The XR stage is already amazing but we haven't even gotten to the new part yet. In fact, what we're doing right now is more like an old movie, where they'd use a still  image or a video behind an actor to put them in another place, like driving scenes and classic  movies. But there's a problem with this "rear projection technique." You see how in this shot with  a rea

l background as the camera moves the objects closer shift at a different speed than the ones  farther away. That's called "motion parallax," and even if you didn't know its name you can tell  when it's not there. It just looks... weird. But an XR stage actually solves this problem because  it lets you create a whole live virtual world in the background and perfectly match it to the  movements of the cameras. So before we just had our backgrounds which are just like a flat 2D plain reference imag

e. Now, we're using the entire background and there's a lot more going  on! The background moves, kind of like as if it was actually a background. This is parallax. And the things in the foreground move differently than the things in the background. I thought that an LED screen would look like the scene to the actor, but it has these kind of overlaid boxes... Like moving windows... Yeah! This moving window is camera sees. So as the camera position changes the window adjusts perfectly to make wha

t's inside look realistic, which it can do because it knows where it's positioned... This little gadget top of the camera, each one of these cameras, is what's giving them the position information... Now, you might be thinking, "well what about green screen?" "Hello there!" "That's been around forever, and it also allows you to put any background you want behind an actor" The problem though with green or blue screens is something that visual effects teams in Hollywood have been dealing with for

years. And you can see it in this behind the scenes  moment.... right there. You see that extra green reflection on the shield? That is called spill, and it is a pain to get rid of after shooting especially if you have a character who, let's  say, never takes off his super reflective armor... [HEY MANDO] With an XR stage, the lighting looks  right while you're shooting. No green spill. No matter how shiny the surface. The spill problem is so real. You're talking about green screens or blue scree

ns or any of that, it works and really  talented editors can sort of hide it but when it's this good and you have the lights matching the room  and everything around like the way this is built is just matching perfectly, it's so much better. This is how they shot Disney's The Mandalorian using an XR stage they call "The Volume," which  let them get all of these gorgeous reflections. "Mando's got a reflective armor. If we weren't  utilizing The Volume, we would almost certainly be replacing all o

f his armor with CG armor." That is Richard Bluff, visual effects supervisor for the Mandalorian. You might have seen his work in little  films like The Avengers or Avatar or Transformers or Star Trek or Iron Man... I was very excited to talk to him. "So the scene with Mando walking into what we call the safe house, that for us was an  obvious choice to go in the LED volume." In this scene, the walls, the ceiling, all virtual, but  casting real-looking light and shadows on the characters inside.

Of course, some things in these  scenes are real, like that pole or that desk... Here's another example: Can you tell where the real set ends and the screen begins? Figuring out what to make real versus virtual in an XR stage scene is an interesting challenge. What they do is they're basically - "- taking a a cookie cutter which is the  shape of the LED volume and basically just slicing it straight through the environment top down..." "It's extension of the real. So they'll have sand on the gro

und and then more sand in the background..." "But it also must mean that you can change things really quickly, right?" A big benefit of this? Just change like time of day... Yes! [Giggle-level excitement] That is a big deal. The power to change backgrounds quickly makes productions cheaper and faster. "If we were Star Wars movie, maybe we would  have 15, 20, 25 standing sets on a whole studio lot, but for the Mandalorian, we only had three  locations on season one to shoot anything. But yet we w

anted to tell a Star Wars story that  required our character to travel to many many different planets. But utilizing the LED Volume meant that we could load different sets up across the entire season." And that brings us to the coolest thing about these screens: If you look closely, you may have noticed there's not just one  box here. There's actually two... which means there are two cameras filming at the same time... which means... "...it must be showing different things to different cameras..

. which really complicated..." "How are you showing different things to different cameras?" "The wall is actually refreshing at 120  FPS and then one camera is capturing 60 FPS and then the other camera is capturing every other 60fps..." "So why is what he just said so interesting?" "That's incredible. Okay. So. 120 frames per second  coming from this. They are alternating between what they show every other frame..." "It's like if you and I were blinking at opposite times, really fast." "That's

really clever tech. So you can point two cameras at  the exact same screen at the exact same place and they will see completely different things." The best way to watch this in action is the Blue-Green Test. "This camera is probably... oh look at that! It's  a green screen on that one.... And a blue screen on that one!" And here's my favorite part: You  remember those reflections? Each camera only sees the correct color reflections too! We tested this with a mirror. "That's insane!" "That's... [

shook]." And it's not just two cameras. This wall can go up to six. So you can have the screen refreshing a minimum of 180 frames per second and six different cameras filming at 30 frames per second and each will see a different thing! "That's the fun we've been able  to have with this technology and really kind of pushing the boundaries of really what's possible." We could have played on the XR stage all day but we were just getting started... Yeah. Things are about to get weird. Hang on a sec,

I'm back in my real, actual studio and speaking of great visuals, one  of the biggest questions I get is, "where do you get footage for your videos?" The answer is Storyblocks, and they're sponsoring this video. Here let me just show you: Okay so in my last video with Marques, all  of these shots are from Storyblocks. Or these in my video on psychedelics, all Storyblocks. Here's how this works: I just go to "Storyblocks dot com slash Cleo Abram" I just type in whatever I want to show and...  bo

om! With my subscription I can download as many clips as I want from their library, they're all  royalty free. Also I really like that they have a creative cloud plugin I use Adobe Premiere so  what that means is that I can access all of the footage and the templates and the audio straight  from my editing software. So go check them out, I think you'll really like them. There's a link in my description, or you can go to storyblocks.com/cleoabram. Now, where were we? Next up is a technology that 

you've seen in high tech movies that's getting way more accessible... "Pleasure to meet you" "Same!" "I'm gonna give you this suit" "Okay" "If you could put this on..." "Getting in the game!" "I'm now a completely velcro human. Time to add tracking markers to me..." "20... 22... 24... 26... 28. 28 dots!" "36 now." "54..." "60 independent tracking orbs...." These motion capture or performance capture suits, they're same category of tech that you've seen in Avatar or Planet of the Apes or Lord of

the Rings. The  suits that we're using today have - "60 dots" - that are being tracked by a handful of cameras around us,  allowing the team at ZeroSpace to map our every movement to any character we wanted including  digital versions of ourselves which we made by getting scanned inside of this claw lookin' thing... "So what are we about to go do?" "We're about to scan ourselves into a virtual creation..." Once we had our scans, the motion capture suits took a few minutes to calibrate so we star

ted playing  charades by only looking at the dots... [FLEXING VERY HARD] "Flexing? Are you a bodybuilder?" "You're The Rock." "Yep. I'm The Rock." "Ok, you do a celebrity." "Okay. Alright, ready?" "Yeah." [LOSES IT] "Who was that?" "You just won. That was amazing." "Oh! Chill, my face is in there." [Laughing] [Laughing] "Wait Cody, you gotta see -" These suits were awesome, but I had a big  question: You probably saw the news around the latest Avatar and how they put actors in  motion capture su

its and filmed underwater. Kate Winslet said she held her breath for  over seven minutes and wondered if she died. My question was: "Why did the actors in Avatar 2 need to be in the water?" "Some of it might just be a physics thing. When I shot  YouTube Rewind that one time I got like lowered out of the bus and I was on like a cable. You  pretend you're falling, your arms are flailing, and then you land, and it's it's 90% convincing  but for the last 10% you have to just do it." "Ahahah. Ah that

's hot!" "So I feel like putting the actual actors  in real water is kind of that last ten percent." "What you try to do with motion capture is  capture the truest form of motion for the scene. So if the scene is supposed to be underwater, you  need people underwater to capture that motion." If you're thinking "Cool for Hollywood but what about me?" Well Marques and I had exactly that same thought. "This looks like the setup for Avatar 1 one which I know was super innovative at the time... you'r

e doing it right now with an iPhone." "That's kind of where my mind goes so like when you look at the future of a tech, on one hand  the ceiling gets higher and higher and it gets better and better but on the other hand, the accessibility, it gets more and more accessible to more and more people." "You can almost already do a lot of this from home as an individual, but over time you're right it's going to become more  accessible to anyone." Some of the implications of more widely available motio

n capture are a little mind-bendy. Marques didn't know we were going to do this but - "Marques, we've now made you into Cleo." "I am Cleo!" "He could do anything!" "I mean, I trust you, but I'm glad this is not like, you know, open sourced!" "Yeah. I AM CLEO. I have all the power. Huge If True, it's my YouTube channel now." Okay, I know he doesn't really look like me in  this very quick scan, but soon he might. Higher tech, more realistic versions of this are getting close  and imagining that wo

rld gets trippy fast. "If that tech really is photo real, an actor's IP of their  face wouldn't -" "Just keeps going. Well into their retirement they're still acting in movies." "Or after they're -" "After they pass, still in movies yeah." Or imagine for example a musician gets scanned and then their choreographer dances as them in their music video. "Are we mad at that? Is that weird?" "Weirdly I'm not that mad about it..." "Cause like if you're a stunt double in a movie,  that's fine. We used

the camera trick we made it look like it was you but it wasn't really you"... "The reason I don't mind when it's a stunt double is I assume that Scarlett Johansson isn't jumping  off a bridge, but if I saw her in a movie I do still assume that she's actually the one acting  in the movie. Like would you want to know if The Rock was physically there on the shoot or if  he was The Digital Rock..." "Yeah they just grab his likeness from the motion capture, drop him  in the movie, somebody else acts,

does the body movements. Is that the future?" "Or it could be hundreds of fake Marques' making MKBHD videos but you just type in your script and you  have your digital double do all the shooting." "Man! I don't know if I like that. If there's a world  where I can just download any actor anywhere, it does level the playing field but it also feels  like now it's not my work as much." I felt really mixed. For one thing, the Internet isn't always kind about aging. "Would it be advantageous to me if

I had a digital double that looked like I'm 30? And does that extend my career in a way that I'm comfortable with, in a way that's like worth it,  in a way that doesn't feel great because I'm not allowing myself to age and then I'm giving into  like... like that's where my mind goes..." "Right. These are the gray areas." We could get lost in these gray areas. But we had one more tool to see and this one felt most like it might change how Marques and  I actually make videos in the future... "Mar

ques, Cleo, come on in to the volumetric video capture stage." "Sure! Ok so we're in." This is volumetric video. By placing cameras around you, it creates a real-time 3D hologram which allows  you to move yourself and the camera anywhere you want. "You don't need to put on a suit, you don't  need to come in early to get scanned. As soon as you step into this volume you get turned into a 3D hologram." "So how many cameras are we using right now for this demo that we just did?" "For this demo, the

re's six cameras." "The camera angle I'm looking at right now is not a real camera angle." "That's right." "It's a stitch of the six." I liked beaming in and out of places sure but  it was really Marques' description of how this tech could be used on YouTube that blew my mind: "This is one of those things where like people have asked, "Marques what is the few future  of video?" and to me I've always been trying to make videos as realistic as possible which is  like first person view, wide angle,

you see the device in your hands and it almost feels like  a natural feature of that is like putting the device in your hands so I'm now holding  the device right now there's like a very flat version of that which is 360 video. I did  a 360 video which was a studio tour which was moving through my studio and you could look  around which was you looking around the 360 sphere but you couldn't like look to the side  and like check underneath, the camera didn't do that. And so this is like an added

  dimension of that interactivity." "Thank you so much, this is so so cool." "Beam us out, Scotty!" 50 years ago, the idea that I'd be telling stories with my own little digital camera, on a channel that's all mine, was totally unthinkable. Today made me wonder what  will making video look like 50 years from now? I don't know. But from what we've learned today, I  think the future is going to be even more open to more people's creativity. We're just going to  be able to do so much more. Advances

in video tech are allowing creators to tell stories that  would have been nearly impossible before, at a pace and a budget that's just been unheard of. As  much as I love cool tech, it's not about how big the screen or how many dots or how many cameras. It's about what we do with them. "There's lots and lots of stories we just simply haven't explored yet that are ripe for the technology that exist today." So the only question left is: What story will you tell? "I'm gonna have Cleo choreograph a

n MKBHD  video. She'll do the whole video and I won't even touch, I won't lift a finger, it'll be amazing. it'll be great. Coming soon, our next collab...