Lightcraft Technology

LLC was founded in 2004 by Eliot Mack, an MIT mechanical engineer who also had a passion for movie making. In 2000 he was the lead mechanical engineer on the Roomba vacuuming robot. Designing the robot entirely in software, Eliot realized that you could similarly create a movie scene by combining live action with 3D backgrounds. He thought this should be easy, and soon movie making would be transformed.

The task turned out to be much harder than Eliot thought, but with his co-founder Phil Mass, they persevered and made a $180,000 system called Previzion.
The real time tracking and automated production pipelines made possible by Previzion made a whole group of episodic sci-fi and fantasy shows possible, including “V “, “Pan Am “, and “Once Upon a Time.”

Lightcraft Technology
Lightcraft Technology

Halide: Cutting Cost and Complexity

In 2015 Lightcraft set out to cut the cost and complexity of virtual production with an entirely new hardware system called Halide. Halide would make it easier to set up, faster to use, and cost half as much, at $95,000.
Halide broke many of the episodic production shooting records held by Previzion, with over 1100 shooting days and counting for the currently running nighttime soap opera ‘Un si grand Soleil’ on France’s Channel 2.

Halide: Cutting Cost and Complexity

2019: Eliot Mack & Bill
Warner Join Forces

With Halide tracking working well, Eliot saw a new opportunity. The cost of Halide could be cut in half again, and it could even run on a laptop. But fifteen years into the journey, Eliot was tired and looking for new energy.

Bill Warner started Avid Technology in 1987. Avid went on to become the top editing system in the world for high end projects. Avid won the Emmy in 1993 and the Oscar in 1999.

Eliot and Bill knew each other because Eliot rented space in Warner’s shared office space when he started. In 2019, Eliot reached out to Bill to help him reinvent the company.

2019: Eliot Mack & Bill
Spinning the Hardware

Spinning the Hardware

Greg Cockroft
Joins the Team

Bill’s long career in technology is based on working with great engineers. Starting in 1985, every company Bill started was given a key engineering lift by Greg Cockroft. Greg wrote the 30 frames per second compression algorithm for the Avid, and the speech recognizer for Bill’s second company, Wildfire. Greg also wrote an innovative mapping system five years before Google Maps came out.

With the task of reinventing virtual production, it was a natural fit that Greg would join. He would code the new Lightcraft system from his farm house in Michigan.

In about six months, Greg had the new hardware working. But then problems emerged, both technical and market related.

Overheating and Under Exciting

The idea of using laptops for heavy 3D production melted away pretty quickly. The laptops would overheat immediately. But that wasn’t the worst problem.

The bigger issue was the market. There were already multiple vendors selling hardware solutions. Lightcraft, the early leader, was no longer alone. Producers often asked for free systems, and when we refused, other vendors gave in. This gave us a moment of clarity. We really wanted to make tools for independent filmmakers but now we had an opportunity to lose money on hardware systems for big productions.

Build Your Startup From the Heart

After Avid and Wildfire, Bill had been working with entrepreneurs to build their startups from the heart, rather than from the logical approach that the startup industry was heavily promoting. See Bill’s TEDx talk here.

While Bill had advised 100’s of startups, it was time to apply the concept to Lightcraft.

The Answer is: No Answer

Bill went to Eliot with an unusual proposal. Let’s cancel our hardware product. Eliot agreed quickly since the pressure and the cost of the production environment was so hard, but now there was no money to be made to boot.

But the answer to the question “what do we do now?” was a simple “we don’t know.”

Benjamin Nowicki – Art Director

Just around this time, we met Ben Nowicki, a Hollywood art director who was focused on bringing the Art Director’s Guild into the modern age with AR technology.

We got to know each other quickly and Bill hatched an idea. Our hardware works and we have a nice small studio with a camera, lights and computers. “Ben, we’ll loan you the whole thing and we’ll upgrade it however you want. Use it. Make it yours.”

Ben did that and together we set out on a new path where none of us knew what would happen.

Build Your Startup From the Heart
Focus on Energy Not Money

Focus on Energy,
Not Money

A Small Team
With Time to Think

Bill was used to raising big money from VCs. But with Lightcraft he took a different approach. By keeping the team small, we gave ourselves time to design the system we wanted to use ourselves. We would fund the company internally with a focus on making the right product, rather than having the highest growth.

A Small Team

A Long and
Excellent Journey

As we were designing the new product, the technology we were using was changing at an incredible speed. Many times we thought “we’ve got it” only to realize that the proposed product would be completely obsolete shortly after we started shipping it.

A Small Team

Thanks to Rev
Lebaredian and Nvidia

We knew that we needed a new underlying structure for 3D. Luckily, Rev Lebaredian was leading a huge development effort at Nvidia to use open standards, major new software and cross-platform tools to transform the use of 3D. Called Omniverse, the system would rethink how 3D could be used in large projects.

Omniverse solved one of the great multi-decade problems in 3D: how to get assets made in one system into a different system, while preserving their material look and feel. The creation of Omniverse enabled small teams for the first time to move 3D objects and scenes into and out of the “walled gardens” that had previously defined 3D graphics.

We immediately started working with Nvidia and we incorporated the standards that they were using. Called Universal Scene Description, (USD), this is becoming a popular worldwide standard, and is now built into all Apple products.

What we didn’t realize at the time was that we were in the middle of a complete transformation from a hardware-based system to one that is entirely based on software on top of the iPhone and iPad. Jeff Kember and Nvidia’s vast team of engineers were always helpful and ready to help us make our product work.

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