Brand Minds Live has been for several years an important business conference in Europe, and probably the biggest in Central & Eastern Europe. The one-day conference would attract hundreds to join world famous speakers share their expertise. However, 2020 made the organizers switch from an established traditional live event to a virtual one that would rise to the demands of interactivity and visual quality of a live event.

Brand Minds extended the Business Summit to 3 days from its original 1 day and increased the speakers to 19 experts from all around the globe which translated to 10 hours live for each day of the event. Zero Density’s Romanian partner Safe Frame, the full-service VFX creation and production company, provided their Reality-powered green screen studio to the Brand Minds team alongside their expertise in using Reality Suite.

Reality enabled Brand Minds to have a seamless live production in “hyper realistic” virtual studio setting with video I/O, keying, compositing, and rendering from one single machine. Reality “ensured the best possible output” with capable and flexible handling of camera tracking alongside Reality Keyer’s control tools.

The preparations for the event took one month with close collaboration of all teams. One month included testing different elements of the virtual stage, rehearsing in the chroma studio with host Pep Rosenfeld and local celebrity guests. The team also ran tests with the international speakers on Zoom Rooms with direct input in Engines, which eliminated latency issues.

Mindscape Studio conceptualized and designed the futuristic virtual set, and produced the graphics. The event employed 3 cameras and 3 Engines. Black Magic URSA Broadcast 4K camera was tracked by Trackmen and two Panasonic AW-UE150 cameras had built-in Free-D tracking. Reality supports industry standard optical and mechanical camera tracking systems. For example, for UE150, the lens of the PTZ camera is already calibrated in the Zero Density system and simply needs to be selected in the Lens node. By connecting the Lens node to the Free-D node, the tracking data starts flowing in.

“Uniting the business world is our mission,” said Avi Cicirean, Brand Minds creator. “But for this year we wanted to unite people from the comfort and safety of their living room. We imagined an event having the main stage in the virtual studio and accommodating numerous world-renowned experts globally, interacting with our diverse audience.”

“Brand Minds Live Summit, the first virtual event of this scale, confirmed what we had envisioned: this is the future of live content broadcasting” added the CEO of Safe Frame, Sebastian Cosor. “It’s the start of exciting times for virtual production.”