Case Study: Zero Density & Brand Minds Live

Brand Minds, the largest Central & Eastern European business event, became the first live virtual global business summit in CEE using Reality Virtual Studio in Safe Frame virtual production studios.

Brand Minds Live has been for several years one of the most important business conferences in Europe and 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.

 “Uniting the business world is our mission,” says 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 extended the Business Summit to 3 days from its original 1 day and increased the speakers to 19 ground-breaking 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 state-of-the-art 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 unmatched quality and clean control tools.

“It surprised me that so many people thought the event was pre-recorded,” says Pep Rosenfeld, the host of the Summit. “It was a delight to prove it was not in a few ways — tweeting a photo in real time, and the walk through on day two.”

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.

“We are excited about the way that our vision was taken further by the team at Safe Frame Studio.” says Avi Cicirean. “Taking the power of education further to change the world can only happen with the support of high-performing teams and tools.”

Mindscape Studio conceptualized, 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.

Lens node

Brand Minds Live is said to be for “world changers” and world changers challenge the status quo and go for what hasn’t been done before. Brand Minds creator’s grand vision for the live Summit was realized by a great team utilizing latest technology and know-how. Reality provides end-to-end virtual production tools to revolutionize storytelling in live events and more.

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

Making Of

Live Walkthrough on Day 2

About Safe Frame

Safe Frame is a full-service CG company, out of Bucharest, Romania, working in advertising, film, animation, and special project development since 2004.  With recently launched new facilities for virtual production using Zero Density Reality Engine, Safe Framed added a wide range of executions: live conferences, advertising, film, theater, and music videos to its capabilities.

About Zero Density
Zero Density is a global leader in real-time graphics and virtual studio technologies for the broadcasting, live events, and esports industries. As the leader in gaming technology in broadcasting, Zero Density offers innovative and user-friendly products that have been adopted by some of the world’s largest companies for covering elections, news and major sporting events such as the World Cup and the Olympics. Headquartered in Turkey, the company also has a US office and serves clients such as The Weather Channel, RTL, Fox Sports and Warner Media.