Virtual Production’s Effect on Production Operations at Scale
Preamble
This white paper focuses primarily on the application of Virtual Production (VP) within the context of long-form scripted entertainment, specifically television series and feature films, as this is where the most extensive and complex use cases are currently found. However, the fundamental principles, strategic benefits, and operational shifts detailed throughout this analysis are universally applicable. The core advantages of VP in cost control, timeline acceleration, logistical simplification, and creative flexibility are just as relevant and transformative for fast-paced broadcast environments like hard news, documentary and current affairs, as they are for sport & lifestyle programming, advertising, and corporate communications. Readers from all sectors of the media industry are encouraged to view these learnings through the lens of their own unique production challenges and opportunities. I have included a section in section 5: Beyond Cinema: Applying VP Learnings to Factual, News, Lifestyle, and Sport, that includes ideas about adapting the concepts in this paper to non-scripted and news environments.
What is Virtual Production?
Virtual Production (VP) is a transformative framework of methods that enables live, direct interaction between physical and digital elements during the filmmaking process. At its heart, VP leverages real-time rendering engines (like Unreal Engine, Maya or Nuke) and motion tracking technology to create a seamless, interactive virtual world. This allows cast, crew, and physical cameras to operate within and influence this digital environment as if it were a tangible location. The result is a dynamic, non-linear workflow where creative decisions are made with instant visual feedback. This collapses the traditional, siloed stages of pre-production, production, and post-production into a single, unified process, empowering filmmakers with unprecedented creative agility and control.
The Current Imperative: Controlling Costs in a Volatile Landscape
The media industry is at a critical juncture. Studios and networks are under intense pressure to reduce spiralling production costs and, most significantly, to rein in the unpredictable nature of post-production spending. The traditional model, where visual effects are addressed months after principal photography, has created a major financial vulnerability.
In this workflow, any scene requiring a digital background is shot with a built-in VFX Overhead. This means every single shot captured, every camera angle and take, carries an unavoidable future cost to be completed in post-production (e.g., rotoscoping, compositing, tracking). Because the final edit and total shot count are unknown at the time of shooting, this VFX Overhead is an unpredictable and compounding liability. Post-VFX budgets become a forecast at best and a source of significant overruns at worst. In this environment, cost control, predictability, and repeatability are no longer just goals; they are mandates for survival.
Introduction: The New Operational Standard
In response to these pressures, the strategic adoption of Virtual Production is becoming the new operational standard for scaled production. Production at scale refers to the challenge of managing a large, concurrent slate of diverse media projects with maximum efficiency. The challenge is not just to produce more, but to do so with greater budgetary certainty and creative ambition, and within a pre-defined and budgeted set of resources.
VP has matured beyond a niche technology into a fundamental business strategy that directly confronts the unpredictability of traditional workflows. To view VP as a tool to be "cherry-picked" for complex scenes is to miss its most profound value. The true competitive advantage lies in its holistic adoption as the operational backbone for all content, providing the very cost control and repeatability the industry demands.
The implications of this shift extend far beyond the technical realm. VP fundamentally alters the economics of content creation, the dynamics of creative collaboration, and the strategic planning required for sustainable production operations. It offers the tantalizing prospect of greater creative control at lower costs, but only for those who understand how to harness its potential effectively.
However, the path to VP mastery is not without its complexities. The technology requires significant upfront investment, both in financial terms and in the development of new workflows and skill sets. Many production entities have approached VP with traditional thinking, attempting to retrofit existing processes rather than embracing the fundamental operational changes that unlock its true benefits. This has led to mixed results across the industry, with some productions achieving remarkable success while others have struggled to realize meaningful returns on their VP investments.
The purpose of this white paper is to provide a comprehensive analysis of Virtual Production as both a creative tool and a business strategy. Drawing on real-world case studies, financial modelling, and strategic analysis, the paper examines the conditions under which VP delivers transformative value and the pitfalls that can undermine its effectiveness. We explore the critical decision between building proprietary VP capabilities versus outsourcing to third-party providers, and we provide practical frameworks for evaluating VP investments in the context of specific production portfolios.
Crucially, this analysis recognizes that VP is not a universal solution. Its benefits are most pronounced in scenarios involving high production volumes, repeatable workflows, and long-term strategic planning. For production entities that meet these criteria, VP represents an opportunity to gain significant competitive advantages in an increasingly crowded content marketplace. For others, a more cautious, project-specific approach may prove more prudent.
As we stand in 2025, Virtual Production has reached a level of maturity that demands serious strategic consideration from all major content creators. The question is no longer whether VP will play a role in the future of entertainment production, but rather how quickly and effectively individual organisations can adapt their operations to leverage its capabilities. This white paper aims to provide the analytical foundation necessary to make those critical strategic decisions with confidence and clarity.