The Entertainment Technology Center@USC will host its 6th vETC virtual conference at SIGGRAPH 2022 in Vancouver, British Columbia, August 9-11. During this year’s vETC at the Amazon Web Services booth (1039), speakers will present concepts, workflows, business models and case studies as they apply to virtual production. Many of the companies that worked on ETC’s latest R&D film project, “Fathead” will discuss their discoveries in sessions that will be recorded and posted on ETC’s YouTube channel. The 3-day program with list of speakers and gear to be demonstrated is available on the ETC site.

Scheduled to present are 5th Kind, ARRI, AWS, Disguise, Foundry, ICVR, Intel, Move.ai, NEP, Netflix, PacketFabric, Perforce, Planar, SMPTE, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Technicolor, Unity and Voluminous (although presentations are subject to change).

Demonstrations will feature a Planar LED wall (similar to the image above) powered by Silverdraft supercomputing. The system is built and operated by Voluminous with Blackmagic Design and ARRI — and includes a 12K URSA camera from Blackmagic and tracking by OptiTrack.

Additional supporting gear has been donated by B&H and MBS. Onset lighting will be assisted by Orbital and ARRI with local resources supported by Annex Pro.

Led by Erik Weaver, director of ETC’s Adaptive and Virtual Production project, this vETC is a restart to the virtual conference, a concept implemented by ETC in 2015 to address the overflow of speakers and topics at the NAB Show. The last program prior to the pandemic, “vETC | The Grand Convergence 2019: Innovation and Integration” was recorded across two days at Technicolor and Google (August 27-28).