Rendering Day for Night: Why Brighter Plates Create Better Night Scenes in Virtual Production
When it comes to night scenes in virtual production, darker isn’t always better. In fact, the reason we render our night plates brighter—and then stop down the camera exposure— is because this method can deliver far better much better results.
DAY FOR NIGHT EXAMPLE, SHOT AT LUMOSTAGE IN VANCOUVER.
We first developed this workflow when our CEO, Alex Pearce, was VP Supervising a short film. The dark driving plates we had at the time, while they looked good to the human eye, the camera wasn’t as forgiving. The darks were very muddy, and looking at the raw image, there wasn’t going to be any latitude to adjust the look in post-production either.
Alex has a background in VFX and Cinematography, and he applied a technique that has been around for a long time, shooting Day for Night, and tested it at the stage, by rendered an alternative version of the same plate, with the general exposure much brighter, but a similar contrast ratio.
To the human eye, it looked way too bright to be a night scene. The LED operators, immediately thought to lower the brightness of the wall to make it look more like a night scene, and this is an obvious thought, but we insisted they keep it bright, in fact we asked them to go to max brightness!
Once it was there, we had the Cinematographer add ND and apply color grading to the monitor, basically had the camera department do as much as they could with the wall at full brightness. Once they had that dialed in, we did a color pass in Assimilate Live FX to tweak the final settings and the end result was much better, the darks weren’t muddy and there was some latitude to adjust in post production further.
This method takes advantage of both the strengths and limitations of LED volumes and modern digital cinema cameras. In this article, we’ll explain why this approach works, how to test it yourself, and how it’s rooted in a classic filmmaking technique known as Shooting Day for Night.
LED Walls Perform Best at Higher Brightness
LED volumes simply don’t perform well at very low brightness settings. When content and wall brightness is too dark, you get poor color rendering, uneven panel response, and limited dynamic range. By rendering our night plates brighter, we take full advantage of the display’s capabilities, ensuring rich colors and consistent illumination across the wall.
Cameras Need Detail in the Shadows
Modern cinema cameras have incredible dynamic range, but that doesn’t mean they thrive in complete black (especially on an LED Wall). If your night plate has dark black shadows with no detail, the image will likely turn out muddy or noisy. This makes it difficult to maintain cinematic quality, especially once you start grading.
By keeping some level of detail in the dark areas (even if it looks too bright to the eye on set), you give the camera and post-production team more flexibility.
Technique: Stop Down Exposure for Final Look
Once your brighter night plate is up on the LED wall, the solution is simple: set the wall as bright as it will go and stop down the camera’s exposure until the scene looks appropriately dark and dramatic. This approach gives you:
Cleaner shadows
Better highlight roll-off
More consistent results across different lenses and camera bodies
You can try this yourself and can easily see the effect:
Play one of our night driving plates on a computer screen.
Point another camera or your phone at the screen.
Lower the exposure manually until it looks like a night scene.
Now compare that to a version that was rendered dark to begin with—you’ll notice the brighter original holds up much better.
Playback Settings and Formats are very Important
Another very important thing to consider is the media server, the LED Processor settings and the playback codec.
If you can playback HDR, this is ideal because night-time plates often have very bright brights (like headlights) and very dark darks. By utilizing HDR, it makes the brights really stand out in a good way.
If you’re using Brompton, they have a few techniques that help with dark content, namely Dark Magic and Extended Bit Depth, but take time to test, because the results are not always better.
The codec and compression settings also matter more than day plates for various reasons. You need to use 10 bit codecs at a minimum. In Live FX, DPX or EXR sequences would be ideal. Of the Normal VP Playback codecs, the best option is HAP HDR (outstanding compression) and then in second place is NotchLC (Best Compression), all other versions should be avoided if possible.
May be hard to tell from a screenshot, but HAP HDR holds up a lot better than Notch LC and should be used if possible.
Explore Our Night Plates
At Sim-Plates, we’re developing a full library of 12K 360° night driving plates optimized for LED stages and virtual production workflows. Our plates are designed to maintain detail even when you stop down the camera, giving cinematographers the flexibility to light and expose scenes exactly the way they envision.
👉 Browse the sim-plates collection here: https://www.sim-plates.com/
Or contact us if you’d like a custom plate tailored to your production.
