Technology will ultimately return to its essence as a tool.

Author: Zheng Xuan

Virtual production, a technical concept that has gained popularity in China over the past few years, is entering a new phase of industrial development.

Since Disney's "The Mandalorian" sparked industry attention in 2020, domestic long video platforms like iQIYI, Youku, and Tencent Video have continued to invest in virtual production technology. Films such as "The Wandering Earth 2" and "The King of the Sky," as well as popular series like "Dream Back to the Past," "Fox Spirit Matchmaker," and "The Qingming Riverside Landscape Map," have incorporated some scenes produced in virtual studios.

At the recently concluded iQIYI World Conference, iQIYI Vice President and Head of Intelligent Production Zhu Liang stated that virtual production has entered a "mass production phase" over the past year: the number of projects has increased by 50%, the 2400㎡ flagship virtual studio in Hengdian has achieved regular operation, and both sci-fi and realistic dramas have begun to adopt this technology. Not only iQIYI, but Tencent Video also announced this year that it has started investing in virtual production to promote the implementation of virtual filming for series.

Why has this technology, which was once questioned as a "pseudo-demand," suddenly gained traction? Is it due to technological breakthroughs or the platforms pushing resources? What is the ultimate direction of virtual production? At the iQIYI World Conference, I discussed this with the iQIYI team and some friends in the film and television industry, and found part of the answer to this question.

01 Technology Does Not Pursue Gimmicks, But Seeks to Adapt to Film Crews

First, let’s clarify what virtual production (Virtual Production) is. Its basic principle combines LED virtual studios with Unreal Engine to generate dynamic digital scenes directly during filming, replacing traditional green screens and post-production compositing, achieving real-time visualization and more realistic visual effects.

In simple terms, it uses digital scenes to replace previous offline sets, allowing actors to shoot in a special studio equipped with LED screens. One moment an actor is in a snowy winter landscape, and the next they can switch to a scorching desert.

This technology can significantly simplify the scene construction and post-production of films and TV dramas, especially suitable for fantasy and sci-fi genres—whether it’s the mythological world of "Dream Back to the Past" or the interstellar travels and post-nuclear Mandalore in "The Mandalorian," traditional construction or pure post-production face enormous challenges.

Despite the popularity of virtual production in China, practical teams often encounter bottlenecks: the technology is cool, but the film crews can't utilize it. For example, engineers may think their "real-time rendering is impressive," but directors only care about whether "actors can get into character in front of the LED screen"; or there are so many system parameters that the script supervisor needs to spend half a day just learning how to upload materials.

iQIYI's solution is also very pragmatic—having people who understand film and television lead the technology, developing a complete system that truly meets the creative needs of filmmakers. For instance, the following innovations in software and hardware may not be the flashiest or most expensive technological capabilities, but they effectively address the pain points of creative teams using virtual production.

1. Self-developed IQ Stage system, which does not pursue the maximum LED screen as "hardware overload," but optimizes the "real-time preview" and "light and shadow matching" that directors care about most, allowing for perfect integration of virtual and real scenes, thus solving the panoramic overhead shooting problem that even Hollywood tries to avoid, breaking through creative limitations.

2. The studio is equipped with the country's first electric rotating platform for art placement, which resolved the inconvenience of front-and-back shooting and scene switching discovered during the filming of "Cloud Feather" during the filming of "Dream Back to the Past."

3. QClip cloud collaboration reduces the time to upload sample footage from "days" to "minutes," so producers no longer have to run around with hard drives. The creative team can instantly see the shooting samples remotely, and combined with the "what you see is what you get" feature of virtual production, it results in less wasted footage and a higher inclusion rate of virtual shooting segments.

It seems that each innovation in software and hardware does not involve developing an "AI large model" or creating the next generation of "game engines" as a groundbreaking breakthrough, but it effectively addresses the real pain points of the creative team, transforming this virtual production system from a concept into something usable, even user-friendly. This laid the foundation for the explosive mass production of iQIYI's virtual production this year.

02 The Secret to Mass Production: Ecological Collaboration

In 2023, iQIYI launched the first series in China using virtual production technology, "Cloud Feather"; a year later, "Dream Back to the Past," produced by the same team, utilized virtual production in seven major scenes, ranking first in the industry in both usage and number of scenes, with an inclusion rate as high as 16%. By 2025, it aims to further promote the large-scale implementation of virtual production, entering the mass production phase. At the World Conference, iQIYI released virtual shooting footage for several new dramas, including "The Tang Dynasty Ghost Stories: Chang'an," "The Legend of Yunxiang: Let’s Drink," "Fox Spirit Matchmaker: Royal Edition," "A Pillow of Spring Flowers," and "With Jin Chang'an."

Currently, most platforms can only shoot one or two virtual production demos, but iQIYI can achieve this not only because its virtual production solutions are closer to the actual needs of filmmakers but also due to platform-level technological collaboration.

At this year's World Conference, iQIYI launched the AI creative tool Script Workshop. During a media briefing, Liu Wenfeng, President of iQIYI's Infrastructure and Intelligent Distribution Business Group, introduced that the number of projects using virtual production has increased by 50% this year, and the Script Workshop has played a role.

iQIYI Vice President and Head of Intelligent Production Zhu Liang stated that uploading scripts to the Script Workshop allows for multi-dimensional analysis, breaking down how many scenes and how many shots the drama will have.

iQIYI's Script Workshop can analyze scripts with potential for virtual shooting and use AI assistance to determine which scenes are suitable for virtual shooting and what proportion of virtual shooting is appropriate at the script stage. This greatly enhances the efficiency of virtual shooting assessments; in the past, an experienced scene analyst might take a week to read a script, but now, with the help of the Script Workshop, the assessment speed can increase several times, while the accuracy of scene selection and the ability to design scenes for the creative team to reference using the image workshop have also improved.

Moreover, virtual production is not just about pre-production studio shooting and post-production editing; to achieve the best results, a set of intelligent production technology systems is needed. For example, QClip's dedicated software and hardware can automatically record and upload the shooting footage from the virtual shooting site, allowing creators to see multi-camera footage in real-time on the director's monitor; simultaneously, this material will be uploaded to iQIYI's "Production Management System" within minutes and synchronized and merged with the metadata of the electronic script supervisor and original materials in the cloud.

With QClip, the editing team can directly retrieve side-recorded files from the QClip server, quickly assess the usability of the footage based on real-time multi-camera playback, and the retrieval and review of scenes on set become more convenient and smooth. The numerous high-standard action sequences in "Dream Back to the Past" were completed based on this collaboration between the martial arts director and the editing team.

Finally, the vast amount of digital material generated by virtual shooting can be reused for multiple scene shoots and post-production editing, and can also be used for further IP development, realizing diversified business models. For instance, the virtual scenes built for "Dream Back to the Past" can be directly used for the series, VR experiences, or even offline theme parks, turning digital materials stored on computers into digital assets that can continuously create commercial value. At the World Conference, many attendees experienced the "Observatory" from the series using Apple Vision Pro in the exhibition area, with high-precision scenes combined with gesture interactions enhancing immersion.

Virtual production is not a "single-point technology," but an "upgrade of the film industry"—today's iQIYI is no longer just a content company; it resembles an "infrastructure provider" for the film and television industry.

03 Future Vision: Technology Liberating Creation

As virtual production enters the mass production stage, its ultimate value becomes increasingly clear.

The cross-form reuse of digital assets is already showing signs: film and television scenes can be replicated in theme parks, transformed into VR interactive experiences, or derived into game skins… This "one-time production, multiple applications" model not only compresses development costs but also ensures a high degree of restoration of IP elements.

For creators, technological breakthroughs mean the dissolution of physical limitations and the release of imagination. Zhu Liang admits that there are still creative teams skeptical about new technologies, worried about the presentation of effects and actors' adaptability. However, he firmly believes that virtual production is not a replacement for traditional filming but opens new dimensions for creation.

For example, grand fantasy and sci-fi IPs like "Game of Thrones," "Star Wars," and "The Wandering Earth" rarely had "small productions" in the past because they required the construction of numerous scenes that do not exist in the real world. In the past, only CG could achieve this, but the production costs could reach hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars per minute, making it unattainable for small teams and causing many excellent sci-fi IPs to miss the opportunity for adaptation.

Today, the combination of AI and virtual production technology allows low-budget dramas to achieve cinematic quality, providing more opportunities for the vast number of high-quality IPs accumulated from China's online literature over the past one or two decades to be adapted into film and television series.

It is worth noting that the application of technology is breaking through genre boundaries. Currently, virtual shooting is still more often used to replace scenes that are difficult to achieve through live-action filming, so the usage rate in sci-fi and fantasy dramas is higher, but the potential for this technology extends far beyond that, becoming a tool for directors pursuing quality to realize creativity in any film or television work.

It has been revealed that iQIYI's virtual production has already begun to be used in realistic themes, such as recreating a long-lost old place in a "memory scene" of a realistic-themed content. In the past, such scenes could only achieve realistic effects through high costs, but with the help of virtual production technology, high-quality shooting can now be completed at a low cost.

04 Conclusion: Returning Technology to Its Essence as a Tool

When virtual production first emerged, some questioned, "Is this just for wealthy film crews?" But iQIYI's practice proves that technology will ultimately return to its essence as a tool—allowing creators to worry less about "how to shoot" and focus more on "what to shoot."

The third episode of "Black Mirror Season 7" has recently gained popularity, envisioning future film shooting without cameras and studios, instead placing actors in a computer-simulated world with brain-machine devices, resembling the ultimate form of virtual production.

Perhaps one day, virtual production can replace today's film production system; in the future, we may not need a physical studio or live-action shooting, but just a few thousand square meters of LED screens and all-powerful AI and digital software to complete the filming of all film and television dramas.

Interestingly, when posed with the question of how much percentage of virtual production is used by film crews or when a completely virtual production film or series might appear, Zhu Liang, who is responsible for iQIYI's virtual production business, is more concerned with how technology can better support imagination and expressiveness, efficiently and cost-effectively supporting the realization of creativity, allowing directors to create better works—this is also the premise for a high proportion of virtual shooting.

While peers are still debating "whether to adopt virtual production," iQIYI is already thinking: how to use this technology to make the next "The Crazy" come to life a little faster?

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