Film and television productions face increasing pressure from tight schedules, high budgets, and scattered teams. Barnabas Csutak, Producer and Growth Consultant at District Cinema, is tackling these challenges with cutting-edge reality capture and virtual production workflows. His approach allows filmmakers to plan, shoot, and preserve projects with unprecedented precision and flexibility.
At the core of Csutak’s work is pre-production. Locations are scanned with centimeter-level accuracy, enabling directors, cinematographers, and art departments to explore sets virtually, test lenses, track sun paths, and take measurements remotely. LiDAR sensors capture hundreds of thousands of points per second, while multiple cameras project high-resolution textures onto the point cloud, creating fully photorealistic 3D environments that teams can navigate as if they were on location.
Set preservation is another key application. Productions can digitally preserve entire environments after shooting wraps, allowing pickups or reshoots without rebuilding or redressing sets. Actors can be placed in front of green screens or LED volumes and composited into these digital environments, saving both time and money.
District Cinema also extends this technology beyond traditional filmmaking. Scanned spaces are used in immersive experiences and event planning, giving clients virtual access to venues for layout visualization and decision-making.
Barnabas Csutak’s broader mission is to democratize virtual production, making these tools accessible to independent filmmakers as well as major studios. He is building a global network of reality capture companies to provide consistent, high-quality scans anywhere in the world, enabling productions to operate without geographic or budgetary limits.