How to Use a 360° Driving Plate on an LED Volume
A driving plate from IgelkottPlates arrives as one equirectangular 360 × 180° ProRes 422 HQ file, shot with one lens on one sensor, stitching-free up to 16K. On an LED volume you map that file to a sphere around the car body, put the camera inside it, and drive both the wall and the interactive lighting from the same source. That is in-camera visual effects, usually shortened to ICVFX: the background is photographed by the taking camera on the day rather than composited afterwards, which is why the plate has to hold up under scrutiny it never faced in a green-screen workflow. The decisions that matter are made before the stage day: usable field, pixels per degree at the window, frame rate and shutter, gamma encoding, camera height, and plate length against take length – all published per plate – plus the playback codec your own chain ingests.
What do you actually receive?
| Property | 8K360 | 16K360 |
|---|---|---|
| Pixel dimensions | 7680 × 3840 | 15360 × 7680 |
| Horizontal resolution | about 21 px per degree | about 43 px per degree |
| Projection | Equirectangular 360 × 180° | Equirectangular 360 × 180° |
| Usable field | 360 × 125° | 360 × 125° |
| Codec | ProRes 422 HQ | ProRes 422 HQ |
| Median plate | 4 min 13 s at 58.45 GB | 3 min 19 s at 80.07 GB |
Plan storage and bandwidth against those file sizes from the start. The specification block is printed on every page in the full catalogue of 437 plates.
What do the 55° outside the usable field mean if the volume has a ceiling?
The sphere is 360 × 180°; the usable field is 360 × 125°. The remaining 55° or so falls outside the usable image. The sky is inside the usable field, so the band that falls on the windscreen and the side glass is real recorded imagery.
If your volume has a ceiling panel a camera can see directly, load the free sample and check the usable field against your own ceiling geometry first. Where the plate does not reach, extend the zenith in the media server with a gradient or a matte matched to the plate's sky, or drive the ceiling purely as a lighting surface. Orient the sphere so the 125° band lands on the glass the camera photographs.
How much resolution reaches the camera?
Reason in pixels per degree, not headline pixel count. A window crops a narrow slice out of the whole revolution, and that slice is then magnified – once onto the wall, again by the taking lens. At 8K a 30° slice carries roughly 630 horizontal pixels; at 16K the same slice carries roughly 1 290.
It shows most from the side. Through the windscreen the world sits far away and moves slowly. Through a side window it is close, sweeps past fast, and a profile framing hands a large part of the frame to a small angular slice. If your coverage rests on side glass, long lenses, or a wall the camera sits close to, license 16K. All 88 16K plates come from the London series, Los Angeles, Upplands-Bro, or the train series.
What about frame rate and shutter angle?
Every plate is shot at a 180° shutter, so its motion blur behaves like a normal cinema exposure. Frame rate varies by plate: both 24 and 25 fps occur, and the rate is published per plate.
Check it before the stage is booked. Run a 25 fps plate against a 24 fps camera and you either retime the plate – softening or juddering the motion you bought it for – or you accept a drift between wall and shutter. Match the camera to the plate, or select plates at the rate the production has already fixed. If you shoot at a much narrower shutter angle than 180°, your foreground will carry less motion blur than the plate behind it; decide in advance whether that difference is one you want.
Which gamma encoding is the file in?
It varies by plate: ACEScct (AP1) and HLG (Rec.2020) both occur, and each product page states which. That one line sets your input transform. Interpret an HLG file as ACEScct, or the reverse, and the blacks lift or crush and the colour shifts before anyone touches a grade – on the wall, in front of the camera.
Fix the transform ahead of the day and confirm it on the wall against a known reference. Each plate is one exposure and one white balance for the whole revolution and the whole take, so once the transform is right it stays right – which is also why a plate works as the single source for reflections and image-based lighting.
How do I match camera height and eye height?
Point of View Height is published on every product page and is constant within a vehicle type, so two plates of the same type cut together without the horizon jumping.
| Vehicle | Height | Plates |
|---|---|---|
| Car | 130 cm (4 ft 3 in) | 391 |
| Boat | 200 cm (6 ft 7 in) | 14 |
| Train | 220 cm (7 ft 3 in) | 17 |
| Bus | 310 cm (10 ft 2 in) | 14 |
Car plates sit at a seated driver's eye height. Set the sphere centre at that height relative to your car body on stage and the horizon lands where the actor's eyes expect it. Because the image is taken from one point in space, near objects – pillars, signs, oncoming cars – stay simple and solid as they pass.
How should I plan playback?
Do not plan to play the master. ProRes 422 HQ at these dimensions is a delivery and archive format; a 16K master around 80 GB will not stream off arbitrary storage at rate. Budget a conversion into whatever codec your media server ingests, test it on the real chain, and keep the master as the reference you regenerate from. NotchLC and other formats are available on request.
The plates are continuous, not looping – what happens on a long take?
A plate runs continuously and ends where the drive ended. In practice most takes fit inside one pass.
- Median length 4 min 05 s; shortest 1 min 18 s, longest 19 min 04 s.
- Of the 437 plates published as of August 2026, 430 run at least two minutes and 395 at least three.
- Car plates: median 4 min 01 s, 349 of 391 at least three minutes, longest 8 min 50 s.
- Train plates: all 17 run over eight minutes, median 10 min 50 s.
If a take outruns the plate, cut back to the start rather than crossfading – a hard restart reads as a new stretch of road. For dialogue-heavy days, select from the long end: every one of the 17 train plates runs over eight minutes, at a median of 10 min 50 s. If the scene has to cross from daylight into night in one place, four locations hold both a full day and a full night selection – Washington D.C. at 53 day against 26 night, Stockholm at 30 against 15, New York at 24 against 14 and London at 7 against 13. Browse the locations to see what each holds.
How do I test a plate against my own wall first?
Every plate has a Sample variant at 0 SEK: ten seconds, the plate's full resolution, watermarked. That is enough to answer this page's questions on your own hardware – does the file play at rate through your server, does your input transform land, does the pixel density hold up on the side window at your lens and your wall distance.
Test before you license. Full licences are 25 000 SEK for 8K360 and 37 500 SEK for 16K360, before VAT, covering one named project in perpetuity, worldwide, across all media formats; named VFX vendors, post houses and colourists need no separate sublicence fee, provided they use the material only for that project and return or destroy their copies on delivery. VAT, payment and delivery are covered on the frequently asked questions page. If the route you need is not in the catalogue, custom shoots start at 125 000 SEK inside the EU, 250 000 SEK outside it, planned at about three minutes of finished plate per shooting day.
Key takeaways
- Equirectangular 360 × 180°, usable field 360 × 125°, ProRes 422 HQ.
- 8K about 21 px per degree, 16K about 43. Side windows and long lenses argue for 16K.
- 180° shutter on every plate; frame rate is 24 or 25 fps per plate – match it before booking.
- Gamma is ACEScct (AP1) or HLG (Rec.2020) per plate; set the input transform accordingly.
- Point of View Height: car 130 cm, boat 200 cm, train 220 cm, bus 310 cm – constant within a vehicle type.
- Median 8K plate 4 min 13 s at 58.45 GB; median 16K 3 min 19 s at 80.07 GB. Convert for playback; NotchLC on request.
- Continuous, not looping. Median 4 min 05 s; 395 of the 437 published as of August 2026 run at least three minutes.
- Free ten-second sample, full resolution, watermarked, on every plate.
388 plates · free sample on every one
See one on your own wall first
Every plate carries a free ten-second sample at full resolution, watermarked. Put it on the volume, judge the stitch-free sphere and the motion, and decide before anything is licensed.
One lens, gyro-stabilized, up to 16K. 14 locations in five countries.
