Technologist, Virtual Production Workflow

Job Description

Optimizing content quality and longevity without compromising efficiency across all types of projects presents significant challenges, but that's what the Creative Technologies team does by setting technical requirements and best practices, driving new industry standards, consulting on the studio's technical infrastructure, providing direct support to Netflix productions and staying up-to-date with the most advanced developments in professional and consumer technology. Our engineers are subject matter experts who offer varied yet overlapping backgrounds in motion picture production, post-production, and distribution - image science, editorial, color correction, image capture, encoding, compression, storage, video, audio... Every day, we collaborate with the crews as well as our internal production, post-production, distribution, marketing, facilities, and development teams.

As Netflix creates more and more programming around the world leveraging new video and audio production technology, we are scaling to support the needs of diverse creative teams while continuing to foster industry-wide change.

About You

You are an expert in the technical practices and tools that support plate capture, camera tracking & live compositing (Simulcam), and In-Camera VFX (LED/Projection), as well as the real-time pipelines that integrate on-set, aka ''virtual production techniques''. You understand current workflows, techniques, stagecraft and tools, and how they're developing as technical and creative demands evolve. You have worked with directors, cinematographers, stage managers, VFX supervisors, developers, supporting them in their exploration of these techniques and the execution of shots and sequences. You keep abreast of developing standards, industry trends, and solutions that are changing how we create imagery that is both fantastic and believable and integrates the photographed and virtual worlds. You have ideas and opinions about how to ensure high quality, creative flexibility, efficiency, and scalability in this domain.

As part of the Creative Technologies & Infrastructure group, you will:
• Work with productions in technical planning and execution of content leveraging virtual production techniques. This includes providing input on component selection and configuration, and liaising with various service providers and vendors.
• Educate internal and external production partners on established and emerging techniques.
• Assess and triage production challenges, escalating issues where appropriate to domain experts.
• Participate in documentation, tutorials and other support resources to facilitate the education of technical creative partners and vendors about our requirements, best practices, and initiatives.
• Provide on-set troubleshooting and execution support of virtual production techniques.
• Evaluate vendors' technical readiness to deliver on a particular production plan.
• Observe and research emerging technologies and techniques for their applicability to our productions.
• Provide technical guidance to develop the best practices and standards that will guide virtual production for Netflix productions, in partnership with the Virtual Production and NLAB team.
• Represent the Netflix Creative Technologies group at industry functions, conferences, committee meetings to drive conversations and outcomes that are impactful to Netflix's virtual production goals.

What success looks like:
• Introduce the virtual production toolset and related techniques to creative technicians unfamiliar with these new methodologies and drive adoption.
• Comfort with and successful execution of virtual production techniques by our creative partners.
• Improved quality and reliability of virtual production service offerings.

Qualifications:
• 4+ years of experience in the virtual production domain, for both features and series.
• Additional experience in the VFX domain.
• Plenty of experience with the production set environment; experience deploying virtual production workflows and environments a plus.
• Deep knowledge of the techniques and toolset.
• Knowledge of and relationships with technology solutions, equipment and service vendors in the domain.
• The communication skills to clearly articulate and document technical concepts and explain how they impact the creative process.
• A passion for the moving image, synthetically generated or not.
• Compulsive curiosity.
• Strong knowledge of workflows and craft, including asset creation, photogrammetry and environment capture, VR, real-time rendering.

Jobcode: Reference SBJ-d5k723-18-116-90-141-42 in your application.