Four RED Cameras, 185.5 Degrees: The Rig Built to Feed Netflix's Virtual Production Wall

On October 9, a small London company announced a camera rig that exists for exactly one reason: a Netflix feature film shooting in the EU needed it. Wonderfilm Pictures, a production and VFX technology firm, built the "4rray," a four-camera array designed to capture the wide, seamless background plates that virtual production stages demand. The system was independently funded, designed, manufactured and deployed in-house on a short timeline, then officially approved by Netflix ahead of deployment.

The specs read like an answer to a geometry problem. Four RED KOMODO-X cameras, each paired with a ZEISS 21mm T2.9 CP.3 XD lens, capture a combined 185.5 degrees of field of view in the standard configuration. Reconfigured, the array can push past 200 degrees. Each camera records 6K footage at up to 80 frames per second. The four bodies stay in lockstep through genlock and timecode, and the whole system runs wirelessly: record start and stop, playback for on-set review, camera control, iris and lens control are all handled remotely through Wonderfilm's Teradek-based ecosystem.

Why 180 degrees is the magic number

Virtual production works by replacing green screens with giant curved LED walls that display real, photographed or rendered environments behind the actors. When the camera moves, the background moves with it, with correct parallax and reflections, so what the audience sees is captured in camera rather than composited months later. The technique went mainstream with The Mandalorian in 2019 and has since become standard for productions that need exotic locations without the travel.

But the LED wall is only as good as the imagery fed into it. Most volumes require a minimum of 180 degrees of captured environment to fill the wall. Shoot a narrower plate and the edges of the stage sit unpopulated, forcing compromises in the final composite. Wonderfilm's established three-camera array delivered 160 degrees, which cleared the bar nowhere. The maths, as founder Lewis Andrews put it, was simple: three cameras at 21mm gives you 160 degrees, and a 180 degree wall needs more than that.

The fix sounds trivial (add a camera) and is anything but. Four camera bodies must share timecode and genlock with frame accuracy, record simultaneously, play back in sync for on-set review, and stitch into one continuous plate without visible seams. On an LED volume, any stitching artefact is displayed at full scale, lit brightly, behind actors being filmed in close-up. There is nowhere to hide.

The overlap is the point

That is why the 4rray's most important number is not 185.5 but 39. Adjacent cameras share a 39 percent field-of-view overlap, roughly 25.5 degrees of shared coverage at every stitch line. The overlap is deliberately generous: it gives the stitching software abundant common pixels to lock onto, prioritizing reliable, repeatable stitching over maximum width. When a production needs the extra degrees, the overlap can be reduced to push total coverage past 200 degrees, trading stitching safety margin for field of view.

On an LED volume, a stitching error is not a post-production annoyance. It is a glowing seam displayed forty feet wide behind the actors.

The wireless design matters too. Plate capture shoots often happen in remote locations or on tight schedules, and running cables to four cameras kills flexibility. Wonderfilm's Teradek-based setup keeps every control channel wireless while preserving genlock discipline, so a small crew can operate the array like a single camera.

Built because a production asked

The 4rray was not a product looking for a customer. Wonderfilm says the project started when Netflix approached the company about the EU feature shoot, and the company designed and manufactured the bespoke system to meet that production's brief, working directly with the production's VFX and virtual production teams. The array is now available for hire for virtual production and VFX plate work in the UK and internationally, so the Netflix job funded a tool that other productions can rent.

That pattern (a specific production forcing bespoke engineering that later becomes industry infrastructure) is how film technology has always advanced. Camera manufacturers rarely invent the future in isolation; they build what the next impossible shot requires.

The wall builders are multiplying

The 4rray arrived in the same fortnight as a wave of virtual production expansion. On October 1, LensStory opened a new virtual production and broadcast studio in Port Melbourne, Australia, combining a large-scale cyclorama and green-screen stage with real-time 3D virtual environments, camera tracking, an LED volume, cinema cameras and integrated broadcast infrastructure. Founders Hemi Hossain and Masudur Rahman positioned it as access for creators who could never afford this infrastructure before: the pitch is that a single physical space can become many virtual worlds.

Two weeks earlier, London's Garden Studios expanded its long-standing partnership with Brompton Technology, adding Brompton's flagship Tessera SX40 LED processors to a new, larger stage purpose-built for driving and simulated travel work. The new stage centers on a 24-meter by 5-meter curved LED wall and a high-resolution LED ceiling designed to capture crisp, in-focus windscreen reflections with no visible pixelation. Garden Studios opened the UK's first permanently installed virtual production volume in 2021 and says its LED wall has more than doubled in size since.

The geography tells the story. London, Melbourne, and stages across the EU are all investing in the same pipeline: capture the world with cameras, rebuild it with LEDs and real-time engines, and shoot actors inside it. A bespoke rig like the 4rray is a small but telling part of that supply chain, the camera hardware catching up to the display hardware.

What comes next

From here, the likely trajectory (and this is analysis, not announcement) runs toward tighter integration between capture and display. Real-time game engines already render virtual environments live on LED walls; AI-assisted plate cleanup and environment extension are pushing the boundaries of what a captured plate needs to contain. If software can reliably extend a 160-degree plate to 200 degrees, rigs like the 4rray become less necessary. If it cannot, and the evidence on a forty-foot screen says artefacts are unforgiving, then the business of photographing the real world with extreme precision has a long future.

Either way, the Netflix brief that started this story reveals something about how the industry now thinks. The question on a virtual production stage is no longer whether the background looks real. It is whether there is enough of the real world, captured faithfully, to fill the wall.