Surging college commitments to bankrolling students’ hands-on experience with virtual production in film and TV degree programs are rapidly closing the knowledge gap that has been a significant drag on the industry’s VP adoption rate.
From schools specializing in creative arts to big universities on both coasts and in many locations between, the last few years have seen a transformation in how students are taught not only to plan and execute productions, but also to work as writers, actors, set designers and other participants in the new creative environment. For the first time, vast numbers of undergraduates, as well as graduates and working professionals who need to update their knowhow, have access to the latest advances in LED volume design, multipanel synchronization, 3D in-camera visual effects (ICVSF), virtual object placement, automated lighting dynamism, camera tracking and other hardware and software technologies that are impacting every facet of professional video production.
“After the pandemic there was a retraction in virtual production because people weren’t able to use the technology,” Habib Zargarpour, co-head of VP at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, said. “We’re now getting a new generation of professionals who are able to do this work.”
The Right Environment
USC’s soon to be completed Blavatnik Center for Virtual Production, which will greatly enhance an existing VP curriculum, is moving in the direction taken by a long list of institutions like New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, with its new Martin Scorsese Center for Virtual Production, and the Savannah College of Arts and Design (SCAD), with professional-scale LED volume projects in Savannah and Atlanta.
Some other well-equipped VP learning centers include the University of Michigan’s Center for Academic Innovation, Arizona State University’s Media and Immersive eXperience Center, Texas A&M University’s Virtual Production Institute, the University of Florida’s Digital Worlds Institute and the University of South Florida’s Zimmerman School of Mass Communications.
NYU’s Scorsese Center, now midway through its second year, occupies 45,586 square feet in a building on the university’s 35-acre Innovation Campus along the Brooklyn waterfront. The facility supports two 3,500 square-foot double-height stages, two 1,800 square-foot television studios, state-of-the-art broadcast and control rooms, dressing and makeup rooms, a lounge and bistro, scene workshops, offices, postproduction labs, finishing suites and training spaces.
“We’re really proud of our facilities,” said Sang-Jin Bae, Tisch arts professor and Scorsese Center director. “A major benefit of what we’re teaching is we’re focused on providing an environment where you can learn the hard skills you need.”
This goes to the quality of the instruction as well as the equipment, he added. For example, the use of the all-important Unreal Engine software stack is taught by three Scorsese staff members who are Epic Unreal Authorized Trainers.
Among the many emergent VP innovations working with Unreal Engine’s real-time execution of 3D environments at the center, Bae lists VICON’s motion-capture system used in camera tracking; AV Stumpfl’s PIXERA media server, supporting 2D playback on the LED volumes; MegaPixel VR processors orchestrating displays on ROE Visual’s BlackPearl2 LED panels; and the ARRI Alexa35 Camera and Zeiss lenses that serve to mitigate the moiré effect resulting from mismatches between camera sensors and LED display patterns.
Of course, learning the technical dimensions is just part of the VP education process. In fact, a recurrent theme arising in discussions with educators like Bae is the extent to which the technical skills they teach are subservient to the goal of achieving creative success. “We’re coming from the end user storytelling side,” he said.
Winging It?
The VP education agenda unfolding at SCAD is no less impressive with regard to both the scale and sophistication of technical support and the range of learning experiences. As with everyone else engaged in bringing VP onto college campuses, the undertaking that started at SCAD in 2021 has been a “figure-it-out-as-you-go” experience, said Quinn Orear, associate chair of film and business at SCAD, who leads the film and TV department at the Atlanta facility.
“This technology is so new for everybody; a lot of us had to learn in step with students,” Orear said. But having no “how-to playbook” to work with had its advantages, including freeing staff “to be creative in discovering new ways to use the technology” aided by training provided by the teams that built the sites.
The experience has also brought into play a new realm of collaboration across disciplines that traditionally worked separately. Production design, visual effects, video game development, editing—it all came together with a faculty “that keeps our feet in the industry as we teach,” Orear said.
The first VP LED volume and XR stage installation was completed in 2021 as part of an expansion project on the 11-acre lot at Savannah Film Studios, which SCAD bills as the “largest and most comprehensive university film studio complex in the nation.” The project is now in its third stage, adding two sound stages and new backlot facades to over 40 separate street facades and more than 8,000 square feet of dressed set spaces that model historic Savannah, big-city streetscapes, and small-town USA scenes from a variety of eras.
A year later, SCAD opened the second VP stage at the recently expanded SCAD Digital Media Center in Atlanta, which, like the Savannah stage, comprises a 60-by-16-foot curved LED wall coupled with a 38-by-20-foot LED ceiling. Both stages are powered by Disguise xR technology running on Disguise VX 4 and RX II servers with LED volumes supplied by DeNyse Digital.
Orear said SCAD, with over 100 degree programs, has made VP training available wherever it’s needed. And, with the Atlanta facility sitting amid a thriving Hollywood East production environment, the VP assets are also getting plenty of commercial use, which contributes further to the general learning atmosphere. “We’re seeing a lot of cross-disciplinary collaboration,” he said.
A Multidisciplinary Mix
A similar culture prevails at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts (SCA) in Los Angeles, where the first two courses in VP were launched in 2022 in support of short filmmaking using the Unity game engine. This was followed by the implementation of the Unreal Engine, with the installation of an LED wall supplied by Sony. A class in LED volume usage followed with students now competing to have their five- to 10-minute projects produced for presentation at the end of the school year.
“We have students from production, animation, interactive, experimental animation, cinematograph—graduates as well as undergraduates,” Zargarpour said. “The multidisciplinary mix has worked well with roles shifting and students learning the best way to make use of the LED wall and how to integrate real with virtual sets.”
SCA doesn’t yet offer a degree in VP, but “we’re working on it,” he added. “Once the new [Blavatnik] center is ready, we’re going to be able to make greater use of the VP technology.”
Funded by a $25 million donation from the Blavatnik Family Foundation announced in mid-2025, the project is still in the design phase with the goal of getting it done “ASAP,” Zargarpour said. The plan, which he helped develop and builds on lessons learned from work with the current LED stage, calls for a multiuse space housing two stages with wraparound LED panel walls, as well as performance capture, camera tracking and lighting systems, along with multiple classrooms and labs equipped with 3D design software and digital asset libraries.
Understandably, given that the schools profiled here and the many others committing to VP are rooted in cinematic arts training, support for use of VP in live sports, news and other TV-centered productions is generally not part of the curriculum. Live “is currently outside our domain,” Zargarpour said. Occasionally, SCAD’s VP facilities are used by “students who want to learn about how LED volumes are utilized in live production,” Orear said, but such experiments are “feeling like early days as that evolves.”
