Coffeezilla's Virtual Production Journey with Mo-Sys

YouTuber and investigative journalist Stephen Findeisen, better known as Coffeezilla, just shared a behind-the-scenes look at how he produces the cinematic scenes his videos have become famous for.

Part of the secret sauce: virtual production on a green screen using Mo-Sys’ StarTracker Max for camera tracking.

Here’s a Coffeezilla’s experience experimenting with different trackers and his testimonial for Mo-Sys, but let’s break it down below.

Coffeezilla’s Virtual Production Journey

• Green Screen is Great…Until You Move the Camera: Coffeezilla highlighted the excitement at initially discovering chroma key. However, the excitement was short-lived when he wanted to move the camera and get the background to match the movement.

• Not enough time to fix in post: Their first attempt was match moving - setting up markers and tracking in post to replace the scene. Could work in theory but they didn’t have enough people power or time to make this option work.

• The Uncanny Valley of Motion Tracking: Real-time, final pixel tracking became the obvious solution, but Coffeezilla hit roadblocks with different trackers having jitter issues. The uncanny valley problem becomes evident as he stresses the need for sub-pixel accuracy.

• Mo-Sys Emerges as the Solution: Mo-sys sent over a StarTracker to try out. 6 months later, it’s become Coffeezilla’s tracking workhouse. “I've used both the StarTracker Original, the StarTracker Max, and you couldn't pry this thing away from me because we use it all the time for the show.”

Our Analysis: More YouTubers and content creators are going to adapt Hollywood tech and production techniques to continue to level up their content and provide a competitive edge.

This strategy has been noted by MrBeast in numerous interviews about reinvesting as much money as possible into the videos he creates. Marques Brownlee uses a robot arm to film commercial quality b-roll shots of the tech products he reviews to differentiate his content from other reviewers.

Prepare for more camera trackers and LED walls to enter the chat.