Color Reproduction in LED Wall Virtual Production Stages

Abstract

Virtual production stages with LED walls utilize illumination, display, and camera equipment which was not designed with this use case in mind. Because the spectral sensitivity of a camera is different from a human observer, a device specific calibration is required. Furthermore, the illumination spectrum emitted by the display contains large gaps in the cyan and yellow wavelength ranges and is dissimilar to the light sources for which cameras are designed. This causes object colors to be reproduced by the camera in an unnatural manner, making cinematographers hesitant to use LED walls as their primary light source. In this paper, a display calibration and camera color correction workflow for LED wall virtual production stages is proposed. A linear color correction matrix and the spectrum of a multi-channel LED fixture are jointly optimized to better reproduce object colors simultaneously illuminated by an LED display and the multi-channel fixture as they would appear under high CRI (Color Rendering Index) light sources. An alternative color correction method using root polynomials is found to further improve color reproduction. It is shown that the camera’s response to the display can be characterized by a linear 3×3 matrix and the display can be calibrated using the inverse of the color correction, allowing for a color accurate reproduction of a virtual environment.