NAB 2025 is in the history books, and as always, it was a whirlwind of new gear, tech demos, and hallway meetings with good friends. Virtual production had a major presence across the booths—but a few products stood out to me. Whether solving pain points or presaging what’s next, here are my five favorite things from the show floor.
1. 🎬 Foundry Nuke Stage
Foundry’s Nuke Stage offers real-time compositing built into the Nuke ecosystem, supporting LED volume and green screen workflows. The goal of Nuke Stage is to bring the expertise of countless Nuke artists into the live workflow of virtual production. These are the early days of this platform, but it’s great to see powerful software being purpose-built for VP by a veteran developer like Foundry.
2. 🎯 Sony Ocellus Camera Tracker
Sony’s Ocellus camera tracker is another excellent solution, especially for those in the Sony camera ecosystem. It’s a hybrid optical/inertial tracker with low latency and built-in Unreal Engine support. I saw it live, and the results were impressive. It’s great to have another major manufacturer offering tracking hardware built for VP from the ground up, as this is the bread and butter of successful LED volume production.
3. 🌐 Xgrids Lixel L2 Pro Gaussian Splat Scanner
This was one of the sleeper hits of the show. Xgrids’ Lixel L2 Pro scanner is all about capturing Gaussian splats. You get a complete 3D environment capture in minutes, not days, and the data is lightweight enough to drop straight into your VP pipeline via their Unreal Engine plugin. For teams doing location digitization or asset builds, this could seriously speed things up and open up new workflows that don’t rely on traditional photogrammetry.
4. 📱Lightcraft JetSet iPhone App
JetSet is an app from Lightcraft that turns your iPhone into a real-time camera tracker using Apple’s ARKit. You can use it for previz, virtual scouting, or even modest virtual production final shots. It’s super approachable and fun to play with, especially when paired with the Accsoon SeeMo converter to bring the live feed from a cinema camera into the iPhone composite. This looks like a gateway tool for filmmakers getting started with VP—or just something you’ll want on hand when inspiration strikes and you want to move far beyond a pitch deck or storyboards.
5. ️🌈 ROE/Brompton/Megapixel Demo Cave
ROE Visual showed off new calibration features, better HDR performance, and a smoother workflow for matching virtual lighting to real-world conditions in their special demo cave within a side corner of their main booth led by Tucker Downs. Brompton powered the RGBW tile, while Megapixel Helios powered the RGBCA product. He also showed off special features for LED, like Frame Remapping, Extended Bit Depth, Dark Time Insertion, and TrueLight, along with a clear-eyed comparison between RGB, RGBW and RGBCA light emitters for color accuracy within a volume—more on the demo.
That’s my shortlist—there was lots of other great stuff at NAB, including awesome demos at the B&H Studio booth featuring Cuebric and Sim-Plates—also, tons of new AI tech, such as the Beeble.AI relighting software.
If you saw something else cool I missed, please leave a comment!
