A director used to working with a green screen, remembers Annapurna Studio’s Chief Technical Officer, C V Rao, was floored by virtual production’s possibilities: “Sir, it feels like I’m flying. I can see my final output. I can adjust my lighting. This is really crazy.” But the “main problem,” he adds, is that “many directors whom we meet—and I’m not blaming them; that’s how we’ve worked—don’t prepare well before the shoot, and they’re not ready to prepare.” Besides, the LED screen can sometimes interact with another device, the movie camera, in unpleasant ways. So, if a cinematographer focuses her camera directly on the LED wall, it produces an interference pattern—comprising repetitive lines, dots, and colour—that ruins the final image. A problem so pervasive it even has a name: the Moiré pattern. Want to see it live? Take a phone camera and record something on TV. “It’s a virtually insurmountable problem,” says Qube’s co-founder, Senthil Kumar, “that will never go away.” It does have a simple solution though, he adds, “the camera just needs to be slightly off-focus.” But it also compromises the depth of field, which “cannot be infinite, only slight, so that the foreground is more focused and the background is slightly off.” Which means it’s difficult to capture a vast landscape in deep focus—unlike a scene shot on location.