... And it might change YouTube, too. So @mkbhd and I tested it out.
Check out Storyblocks and sign up here for great footage: https://storyblocks.com/cleoabram 

Watch MKBHD's video: https://youtu.be/RM7SobH8ZO0
Subscribe to MKBHD: https://www.youtube.com/mkbhd 

Subscribe to Huge If True to support optimistic tech content: https://www.youtube.com/cleoabram?sub_confirmation=1

I’ve been obsessed with sci-fi movies since I was a kid. I love being transported to another world. But lately, I’ve been wondering: How do those worlds look so… REAL? The tech behind movies has exploded in complexity and realism, changing how stories come to life on screen.

Luckily, at the same time, those tools are becoming more and more available to more people telling stories. It’s not just blockbusters like Avatar 2 or Avengers or Dune. It’s also smaller budget films like Everything Everywhere All at Once or even… YouTube creators?

In this video, Marques Brownlee and I test out 3 movie-making tools that are changing how movies, shows, and maybe even YouTube videos (??) get made. We’re at ZeroSpace Studios in New York to show you how each of these crazy technologies work - and how you might be able to use them. Along the way, we hit big questions like: What is the future of video? Can actors stop aging? Can WE? Do you care if an actor has a digital double? Should the audience choose where the camera goes? Most of all, what we discover is a new world of video creation, hopefully open to more and more people’s creativity.

Chapters: 
00:00 How do movies look so real?
1:18 The future of green screen?
3:31 The problem with green screen
4:33 How was The Mandalorian filmed?
6:11 How to shoot two scenes AT ONCE
8:39 How motion capture works
10:06 Why was Avatar 2 filmed underwater?
11:05 What happens if you can be... anyone?
13:51 What is volumetric video?
15:33 What's the future of video?

Thank you to the entire team who helped make this video possible! They are:
From ZeroSpace:
- Creative Director: Kevin Peter He
- Head of Research: Evan Clark
- Technical Director: Eric Chang
- Producer: Elena Piech
- Mocap Operator: Sammy Sords
- Mocap Asst./ PA: Kimani Reid
- Disguise Asst. / PA: Omar Jones
- 3D Modeler: Maya Lila
- CEO: Jon Kreutzer
- CTO: James Tunick
From 4Wall Entertainment (a joint partnership on the XR/ICVFX Stage):
- VP of Special Projects: Ben Danielowski
- VP of Special Projects: Mathew Leland
- L1: Zach Sager
From Scatter Depthkit (a joint partnership on the volumetric video):
- CEO & Co-Founder of Scatter, creators of Depthkit: James George
- Lead Technical Producer: Cory Allen
From Cause + Christi Immersive XR Design:
- Co-Founder: Austin Caine
- Co-Founder: Christi Fenison
From Scheimpflug:
- Photogrammetry Lead: Joachim Pfefferkorn

You can find me on TikTok here for short, fun tech explainers: https://www.tiktok.com/@cleoabram 
You can find me on Instagram here for more personal stories: https://www.instagram.com/cleoabram 
You can find me on Twitter here for thoughts, threads and curated news: https://twitter.com/cleoabram 

Bio:
Cleo Abram is an Emmy-nominated independent video journalist. On her show, Huge If True, Cleo explores complex technology topics with rigor and optimism, helping her audience understand the world around them and see positive futures they can help build. Before going independent, Cleo was a video producer for Vox. She wrote and directed the Coding and Diamonds episodes of Vox’s Netflix show, Explained. She produced videos for Vox’s popular YouTube channel, was the host and senior producer of Vox’s first ever daily show, Answered, and was co-host and producer of Vox’s YouTube Originals show, Glad You Asked. 

Additional reading and watching:
- ZeroSpace Studios: https://www.zerospace.co/ 
- Scatter Depthkit Volumetric Video: https://www.depthkit.tv/
- Cause + Christi: Immersive XR Design: https://causechristi.com
- Quantum Computers, explained with MKBHD (our previous collab!): https://youtu.be/e3fz3dqhN44  
- Avatar Scenes Without CG, The Things: https://youtu.be/Cimy6T1nczw 
- Why 'The Mandalorian' Uses Virtual Sets Over Green Screen, Insider: https://youtu.be/Ufp8weYYDE8 
- VFX Artists React to Avatar 2 CGi (ft. Weta FX), Corridor Crew: https://youtu.be/c4Gd0bR2kb4 
- Did We Just Change Animation Forever? Corridor Crew (I love Corridor Crew): https://youtu.be/_9LX9HSQkWo 
- Why volumetric video matters, by James George: https://medium.com/@obviousjim/expressing-our-true-likeness-in-the-metaverse-with-volumetric-video-8ed3bea7c6d0 

Vox: https://www.vox.com/authors/cleo-abram
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm10108242/ 

Gear I use: 
Camera: Sony A7SIII
Lens: Sony 16–35 mm F2.8 GM and 35mm prime
Audio: Sennheiser SK AVX

Music: Musicbed

—
Welcome to the joke down low:

What do you call security guards at Samsung stores?
Guardians of the Galaxy.

Use the word “galaxy” in a comment to let me know you’re a real one :)

Today I'm testing out some insane tech and seeing how movies really get made.

But hold on, let me start from the beginning.

There's a chance that it looked pretty...

The tech behind how they make movies these days has exploded in complexity and realism.

And it's not just Hollywood, it's gotten to the point where I could be watching a YouTube video and not be totally sure what's real

I am in a warehouse full of the tech behind my favorite movies.

Today I'm at 0 Space Studios in New York with Marques Brownlee, who knows a thing or 2 about dope tech.

The old rules about how media gets made are basically rewritten.

0 Space has given us full access to their warehouse full of amazing movie making toys.

We're going to get to try out 3 truly wild tech tools that are changing how movies get made.

And we're going to explore how you and we can use them.

This might be a very expensive date for me.

If you want to come over here, That'd be really helpful.

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.

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 1 of the reveal takes that we should have is you just walking in the background.

Mark has pulled a similar trick on his channel.

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 in classic movies.

But there's a problem with this rear projection technique.

You see how in this shot with a real background, as the camera moves, the objects closer shift at a different speed than the ones farther away.

And even if you didn't know its name, you can tell when it's not there.

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 plane reference image.

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.

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.

This moving window is what the camera sees.

So As the camera position changes, the window adjusts perfectly to make what's inside look realistic, which it can do because it knows where it's positioned.

This little gadget on top of the camera, each 1 of these cameras, is what's giving them the position information.

Now, You might be thinking, well, what about green screen?

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.

With an XR stage the lighting looks right while you're shooting.

No green spill, no matter how shiny the surface.

You're talking about green screens or blue screens 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 called the volume, which let them get all of these gorgeous reflections.

If we weren't utilizing the volume, we would almost certainly be replacing all of 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.

So the scene where 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.

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.

taking a cookie cutter, which is the shape of the LED volume, and he's basically just slicing it straight through the environment top down.

So they'll have like sand on the ground 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 time of day.

The power to change backgrounds quickly makes productions cheaper and faster.

If we were a Star Wars movie, maybe we would have

But for The Mandalorian, we only had 3 locations on season 1 to shoot anything.

But yet, we wanted to tell a Star Wars story that required our character to travel to many, 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 1 box here.

There's actually 2, which means there are 2 cameras filming at the same time, which means...

It must be showing different things to different cameras, which is really complicated.

How are you showing different things to different cameras?

The wall is actually refreshing at 120 FPS, And then 1 camera is capturing 60 FPS, and then the other camera is capturing every other 60 FPS.

So why is what he just said so interesting?

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.

So you can 0.2 cameras at the exact same screen at the exact same place and it will see completely different things.

The best way to watch this in action is the blue-green test.

This camera, it probably, oh, look at that.

It's a green screen on that 1 and a blue screen on that 1.

Each camera only sees the correct color reflections, too.

So you can have the screen refreshing at a minimum of 180 frames per second, and 6 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.

Hang on a sec, I'm back in my real actual studio.

And speaking of great visuals, 1 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.

Okay, so in my last video with Marques, all of these shots are from Storyblocks.

Or these in my video on psychedelics, all Storyblocks.

I just go to storyblocks.com slash Cleo Abram.

I just type in whatever I want to show and boom!

With my subscription I can download as many clips as I want from their library.

Also I really like that they have a Creative Cloud plugin.

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 slash Cleo Abram.

Next up is a technology that you've seen in high tech movies that's getting way more accessible.

These motion capture or performance capture suits, they're the 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 0 Space 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-looking thing.

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 started playing charades by only looking at the dots.

You probably saw the news around the latest Avatar and how they put actors in motion capture suits and filmed underwater.

Kate Winslet said she held her breath for over 7 minutes and wondered if she died.

why did the actors in Avatar 2 need to be in the water?

it I think might just be a physics thing.

Like when I shot YouTube Rewind that 1 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 90% convincing, but for the last 10%, you have to just do it.

So I feel like putting the actual actors in real water is kind of that last

What you're trying 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, which I know was super innovative at the time.

You're doing it right now with an iPhone.

So like, when you look at the future of a tech, on 1 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 gonna become more accessible to anyone

some of the implications of more widely available motion capture are a little mind-bendy Marquez didn't know we were gonna do this but

Marquez we've now made you into clear He could do anything.

I mean, I trust you, but I'm glad that this is not, like, you know, open source.

OK, 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 world gets trippy fast.

If that tech really is photo real, an actor's IP of their face wouldn't.

Well into their retirement, they're still acting in movies.

Or after they pass, they're still acting in movies.


Speaker 0: Oh, that's insane!

Speaker 1: Today I'm testing out some insane tech and seeing how movies really get made. But hold on, let me start from the beginning. 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 Hollywood, it's gotten to the point where I could be watching a YouTube video and not be totally sure what's real

Speaker 0: 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.

Speaker 1: Today I'm at 0 Space Studios in New York with Marques Brownlee, who knows a thing or 2 about dope tech.

Speaker 2: The old rules about how media gets made are basically rewritten. You can do whatever you want.

Speaker 1: 0 Space has given us full access to their warehouse full of amazing movie making toys. We're going to get to try out 3 truly wild tech tools that are changing how movies get made. And we're going to explore how you and we can use them.

Speaker 2: This might be a very expensive date for me. Let's do it!

Speaker 0: 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.

Speaker 1: 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.

Speaker 0: This is my perspective, just on my phone, of what's going on right now. Maybe 1 of the reveal takes that we should have is you just walking in the background. I'm like, what's going on?

Speaker 2: Oh, I'm in the wrong video. Sorry.

Speaker 1: Mark has pulled a similar trick on his channel.

Speaker 2: Is this rolling already? Hey, what's up? MKBHD here. Welcome back to Dope Tech.

Speaker 0: So what would you use this for?

Speaker 2: We would just design awesome sets over and over again behind us.

Speaker 1: 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 in classic movies. But there's a problem with this rear projection technique. You see how in this shot with a real 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.

Speaker 2: So before we just had our backgrounds, which are just like a flat 2D plane reference image. 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. Like this is parallax.

Speaker 0: 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.

Speaker 2: Like moving windows?

Speaker 0: Yeah.

Speaker 1: This moving window is what the camera sees. So As the camera position changes, the window adjusts perfectly to make what's inside look realistic, which it can do because it knows where it's positioned.

Speaker 2: This little gadget on top of the camera, each 1 of these cameras, is what's giving them the position information.

Speaker 1: Now, You might be thinking, well, what about green screen?

Speaker 0: Hello there.

Speaker 1: 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. With an XR stage the lighting looks right while you're shooting. No green spill, no matter how shiny the surface.

Speaker 2: The spill problem is so real. You're talking about green screens or blue screens 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.

Speaker 1: This is how they shot Disney's The Mandalorian, using an XR stage they called the volume, which let them get all of these gorgeous reflections.

Speaker 3: Mando's got reflective armor. If we weren't utilizing the volume, we would almost certainly be replacing all of his armor with CG armor.

Speaker 1: 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.

Speaker 3: So the scene where Mando walking into what we call the safe house, that for us was an obvious choice to go in the LED volume.

Speaker 1: 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

Speaker 3: taking a cookie cutter, which is the shape of the LED volume, and he's basically just slicing it straight through the environment top down.

Speaker 2: It's extension of the real. So they'll have like sand on the ground and then more sand in the background.

Speaker 0: But it also must mean that you can change things really quickly, right? A big benefit of this, just change time of day.

Speaker 1: Yes. Yes. That is a big deal. The power to change backgrounds quickly makes productions cheaper and faster.

Speaker 3: If we were a Star Wars movie, maybe we would have

Speaker 0: 15, 20, 25

Speaker 3: standing sets on a whole studio lot. But for The Mandalorian, we only had 3 locations on season 1 to shoot anything. But yet, we wanted to tell a Star Wars story that required our character to travel to many, many, many different planets, but utilizing the LED volume meant that we could load different sets up across the entire season.

Speaker 1: And that brings us to the coolest thing about these screens. If you look closely, you may have noticed there's not just 1 box here. There's actually 2, which means there are 2 cameras filming at the same time, which means...

Speaker 2: It must be showing different things to different cameras, which is really complicated.

Speaker 0: How are you showing different things to different cameras?

Speaker 4: The wall is actually refreshing at 120 FPS, And then 1 camera is capturing 60 FPS, and then the other camera is capturing every other 60 FPS.

Speaker 0: So why is what he just said so interesting?

Speaker 2: That's incredible. Okay, so 120 frames per second coming from this, They are alternating between what they show every other frame.

Speaker 0: It's like if you and I were blinking at opposite times.

Speaker 2: Exactly.

Speaker 0: Really fast.

Speaker 2: That's really clever tech. So you can 0.2 cameras at the exact same screen at the exact same place and it will see completely different things.

Speaker 1: The best way to watch this in action is the blue-green test.

Speaker 2: This camera, it probably, oh, look at that. It's a green screen on that 1 and a blue screen on that 1.

Speaker 1: 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!

Speaker 2: That's...

Speaker 1: And it's not just 2 cameras. This wall can go up to 6. So you can have the screen refreshing at a minimum of 180 frames per second, and 6 different cameras filming at 30 frames per second, and each will see a different thing.

Speaker 3: 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.

Speaker 1: 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, 1 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.com slash Cleo Abram.

I just type in whatever I want to show and boom! 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 slash Cleo Abram. Now, where were we? Next up is a technology that you've seen in high tech movies that's getting way more accessible.

Speaker 2: Pleasure to meet you. Same.

Speaker 0: I'm gonna give you this suit. Okay. If you could put this on.

Speaker 2: I'm getting in the game. I am now a completely Velcro human. Time to add tracking markers to me.

Speaker 0: 20, 22, 24, 26, 28. 28

Speaker 2: dots. 36 now. 54. 60 independent tracking orbs.

Speaker 1: These motion capture or performance capture suits, they're the same category of tech that you've seen in Avatar or Planet of the Apes or Lord of the Rings.

Speaker 2: The suits that we're using today have 60 dots.

Speaker 1: That are being tracked by a handful of cameras around us, allowing the team at 0 Space 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-looking thing. So what are we about to go do?

Speaker 2: We're about to scan ourselves into a virtual creation.

Speaker 1: Once we had our scans, the motion capture suits took a few minutes to calibrate. So we started playing charades by only looking at the dots.

Speaker 5: Flexing? Are you a bodybuilder? You're the rock.

Speaker 0: Yep, I'm the rock. Okay, you do a celebrity.

Speaker 2: Okay, all

Speaker 0: right. Ready?

Speaker 1: Yeah. Oh!

Speaker 2: Who was that?

Speaker 0: You just won. That was amazing.

Speaker 2: Oh, chill. My face is in there. Oh.

Speaker 1: 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 suits and filmed underwater. Kate Winslet said she held her breath for over 7 minutes and wondered if she died. My question was,

Speaker 0: why did the actors in Avatar 2 need to be in the water? Some of

Speaker 2: it I think might just be a physics thing. Like when I shot YouTube Rewind that 1 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 90% convincing, but for the last 10%, you have to just do it.

Speaker 0: Ah, ha, ha!

Speaker 1: Oh, that's hot!

Speaker 2: So I feel like putting the actual actors in real water is kind of that last

Speaker 0: 10%.

Speaker 3: What you're trying 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.

Speaker 1: If you're thinking, cool for Hollywood, but what about me? Well, Marques and I had exactly that same thought.

Speaker 0: This looks like the setup for Avatar 1, which I know was super innovative at the time. You're doing it right now with an iPhone.

Speaker 2: That's kind of where my mind goes. So like, when you look at the future of a tech, on 1 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.

Speaker 0: You can almost already Do a lot of this from home as an individual but over time you're right It's gonna become more accessible to anyone

Speaker 1: some of the implications of more widely available motion capture are a little mind-bendy Marquez didn't know we were gonna do this but

Speaker 0: Marquez we've now made you into clear He could do anything. I mean, I trust you, but I'm glad that this is not, like, you know, open source.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I am Cleo. I have all the power. Huge if true. It's my YouTube channel now.

Speaker 1: OK, 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 world gets trippy fast.

Speaker 0: If that tech really is photo real, an actor's IP of their face wouldn't.

Speaker 2: It just keeps going. Well into their retirement, they're still acting in movies.

Speaker 0: Or after they're...

Speaker 2: Or after they pass, they're still acting in movies.

Speaker 1: Or imagine, for example, a musician gets scanned, and then their choreographer dances as them in their music video.

Speaker 2: Are we mad at that? Is that weird?

Speaker 1: Weirdly, I'm not that mad

Speaker 0: about it.

Speaker 2: Because there's like, if you're a stunt double in a movie. Yeah, that's fine. We used a camera trick We made it look like it was you but wasn't really you.

Speaker 0: 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 1 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?

Speaker 2: Yeah, they just grab his likeness from the motion capture, drop them in the movie, somebody else acts, does the body movements. Is that the future?

Speaker 0: Or it could be hundreds of fake Marquesas making MKBHD videos, but you just type in your script and you have your digital devil do all the shooting.

Speaker 2: 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.

Speaker 1: I felt really mixed. For 1 thing, the internet isn't always kind about aging.

Speaker 0: Would it be advantageous to me if I had a digital devil 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 it to like Like that's where my mind goes.

Speaker 2: Right. These are the gray areas.

Speaker 1: We could get lost in these gray areas, but we had 1 more tool to see. And this 1 felt most like it might change how Marques and I actually make videos in the future.

Speaker 5: Marques, Cleo, come on into the volumetric video capture stage.

Speaker 2: Sure. Okay, so we're in.

Speaker 1: 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.

Speaker 5: 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.

Speaker 2: So how many cameras are we using right now for this demo that we just did?

Speaker 5: For this demo, there are 6 cameras.

Speaker 2: The camera angle we're looking at right now is not a real camera angle. It's a stitch of the 6. Right. Right. Right.

Speaker 1: 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.

Speaker 2: This is 1 of those things where people have asked, like Marques, what is the 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 the natural future 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.

Speaker 0: I

Speaker 2: 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 because you the camera didn't do that And so this is like an added dimension of that interactivity.

Speaker 0: Thank you so much 50

Speaker 1: 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.

Speaker 3: There's lots and lots and lots of stories we just simply haven't explored yet that are ripe for the technology that exists today.

Speaker 1: So the only question left is, what story will you tell?

Speaker 0: I'm going

Speaker 2: to have Cleo choreograph an 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.

Speaker 0: Coming soon. Our next collab. I love you.

See all Cleo Abram transcripts on Youtube

This Tech Will Change Movies Forever