How Vū Technologies powers virtual production with Transloadit video encoding
Walk onto a film set at Vū Technologies and there is no green screen in sight. Instead, actors perform in front of massive LED video walls that render photorealistic backdrops in real time: a sunset beach, a mountain pass, a cyberpunk alley. The director simply swipes the next scene onto the wall from an iPad. Vū operates a network of virtual production studios across the United States and has built custom LED stages for brands such as the PGA Tour and the Tampa Bay Lightning. Behind those walls runs Vū Studio, their software ecosystem for managing and playing back media. And behind Vū Studio's video pipeline runs Transloadit.
Vū's production team shot and edited a one-minute case study about our collaboration, on their own LED stages of course:
The challenge: any codec in, flawless pixels out
A video wall that spans an entire studio is unforgiving. The wall is the set, so every pixel of the backdrop ends up in the final footage. Compression artifacts that would go unnoticed on a phone screen, such as banding in a gradient or softness in a pan, become part of the movie.
At the same time, Vū cannot dictate what their customers upload. As Cris Coffey, VP of Product at Vū, explains in the video:
“Our clients need to be able to use their own media files, which often come in a variety of codecs and containers and resolutions. And we struggled for a long time to find a system that can ingest that wide range of data.”
In practice that means multi-gigabyte ProRes 422 masters, motion graphics with subtle gradients, and originals of up to 10K resolution, all of which need to become standardized, high-quality MP4s that Vū's media players can stream to any stage. When Vū compared vendors for this pipeline, one capability settled it:
“Transloadit stood apart from the other options because of its 8K encoding.”
The solution: a tuned encoding pipeline, and founders in the loop
Vū's platform now sends every upload through Transloadit Templates built around our 🤖 /video/encode Robot. Together with Vū's engineers, we tuned the Assembly Instructions well beyond the defaults:
- Near-lossless quality settings that keep gradients smooth on a wall of LEDs, while still producing web-friendly MP4s
- Stream mapping and pixel format tweaks so that every output plays back everywhere, from Vū's media servers to a plain Windows laptop
- Preserving each file's original framerate through dynamic instructions such as
"r": "${file.meta.framerate}" - Disabling upscaling with
"zoom": false, so smaller sources keep their native resolution instead of being inflated to 4K - 🤖 /video/thumbs for the preview thumbnails in Vū Studio's media library
- Usage tags on Assemblies, so Vū can report processing volume per end customer
Integration questions did not go through a ticket queue. Vū shares a Slack channel with Transloadit's founders, and questions about preset behavior or a slow transcode are typically answered within hours, directly by the people who built the platform.
“Once we had Transloadit integrated, we didn't have to worry so much about maintaining our own media processing technology on our side. With Transloadit, we could basically transcode from just about anything to just about anything.”
The outcome: upload, swipe, action
Since going live in 2025, the workflow on a Vū stage is exactly as simple as the video shows: a customer uploads footage to Vū Studio, Transloadit encodes it in the background, and moments later the clip is on the wall, controlled from an iPad. Vū's team stays focused on virtual production instead of on FFmpeg flags, and new formats are one conversation away rather than an infrastructure project. As Vū's engineering team puts it:
“The beautiful thing about the way Transloadit operates is that their system is entirely modular in what codecs we use, manage, support, and transcode to and from. As the media landscape evolves and our customers come to us with new things they want to support, we can trust that we’ll always be available.”
The collaboration keeps evolving, too. Higher-resolution output tiers, additional professional codecs, and AI-powered labeling of uploaded footage are all on the shared roadmap.
If your product also needs to turn unpredictable customer uploads into predictable, high-quality video, have a look at our video encoding service or reach out and talk directly with a human.