Cinemetaverz is a virtual production studio in Hyderabad, running live in-camera VFX on a chroma floor. The pipeline is built on Unreal Engine, environments are lit and previsualised before the camera rolls, and the director sees the finished frame while the actor is still standing on it. Dharmender Jallipalli, production designer and co-founder, walked us through a shoot day.
The Challenge: Five Sets, One Take
Dharmender and his team wanted to attempt a sequence that would traditionally take a VFX house weeks: moving an actor through five entirely different digital environments in a single, continuous camera shot.
“The challenge is like, want an actor to travel from one set to another set, like in a sequence in one take through five assets. So five different assets as one asset.”
Normally, a virtual production crew loads a single 3D environment into graphics memory, shoots the scene, and then halts production to unload that asset and load the next.
A continuous one-take sequence through five sets meant the hardware had to do four massive jobs simultaneously, 24 times a second: build the geometry, calculate the lighting, key the actor out of the green screen, and stitch the composite together.
To execute this without cutting the camera, the system needed to hold at least two active environments in memory at all times, loading the next set and deleting the previous one in a seamless loop.
“Traditional filmmaking has rules. We can bend the rules. But virtual production has a law. So we cannot change the law.”
The second problem sits underneath the first. If a production machine is unreliable and fails mid-take, it costs an entire booked floor and a crew on payroll.
The Solution: Configured Against the Shot
To ensure the hardware would never be the bottleneck during the five-set continuous sequence, theMVP configured a workstation housed in a Fractal Design 7 tower, allowing it to sit directly on the shoot floor without requiring a dedicated server room. The system was built with precise workflow justifications in mind
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 (32 GB GDDR7 VRAM): A single production-level Unreal Engine scene typically requires an upper limit of 16 GB of video memory. To keep the seamless set-changing loop running, the RTX 5090’s 32 GB capacity allows two complete environments to sit in the graphics memory simultaneously.
- AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9980X (64 Cores / 128 Threads): Every time a director asks the production designer to swap a texture or adjust a light, Unreal Engine must completely rebuild the scene’s lighting. With 64 high-speed cores, the machine compiles shaders and bakes lighting in the same amount of time it takes the camera team to reset, meaning the crew never has to stand around waiting on the computer.
- 128 GB Quad-Channel DDR5 Memory: For the continuous set-changing loop to function, the massive incoming environments cannot be pulled off a storage drive mid-take. 128 GB of system memory allows the upcoming sets to sit fully cached and ready to deploy instantly as the actor walks.
By engineering a system tailored specifically to in-camera visual effects, theMVP provided Cinemetaverz with the exact tools and assurances needed to remove technical barriers, allowing filmmakers to focus entirely on their imagination.
However, Dharmender’s primary concern went beyond sheer performance; it was about reliability and downtime.
If a workstation goes down mid-take, a standard warranty claim and replacement process can easily take two weeks. For a live production floor with an active crew and actors, that kind of delay is catastrophic.
“Luckily, we have an assurance from MVP that they will be supporting us in giving us a backup for the systems whenever we are shooting. So far we have been partnered with MVP for the past three years.”
— Dharmender Jallipalli
theMVP addressed this bottleneck by implementing a standard stand-by replacement policy. Instead of waiting for an RMA, if a component fails on shoot day, theMVP immediately ships a replacement part so the shoot can continue while the warranty claim processes in the background.
Have a look at Cinemetaverz to see the ICVFX and previsualisation work they are doing out of Hyderabad.
For more on how we spec workstations for Unreal Engine, virtual production, and real-time pipelines, watch this video on our channel.
Talk to Us
At theMVP, we specialize in engineering custom, high-performance workstations and servers tailored precisely to the demands of professional and creative workflows and if you have any compute requirements feel free to give us a call on our toll free number 1800 309 2944 or visit us at themvp.in.
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