Lightcraft's Previzion renders its own scene, not Unreal's

The stage

Lightcraft Technology's Previzion system is documented on the company's own technical specifications page, archived 1 February 2023 and cited here because the live lightcrafttech.com site now returns only a placeholder page, with the company's current operating status unverified as of 16 September 2026. The archived page states Previzion includes a built-in 3D render engine rather than relying on a separate game engine, supporting up to eight HD video plates or three 4K plates at 23.98fps, up to three gigapixels of textures and up to twelve million polygons, alongside baked-in lighting, spherical reflections and full depth-of-field support.

What the documents establish

The specification page lists a wide, named set of lens-metadata protocols it reads over serial or SDI, including Preston, Cooke Lens Protocol, Mo-Sys Crane Lens Protocol, Cameron Pace Group metadata and 'Arri LDS over SDI,' alongside its own camera-position system, described as 'Lightcraft Airtrack and Intersense Genlocked Optical/Inertial Tracking,' plus support for named crane systems including Mo-Sys, SpiderCam and Kuper. This is a self-contained hardware and software stack, not a plugin feeding an external engine, which distinguishes it in kind from the Unreal Engine Live Link approach other vendors in this category document. The page states genlock via SMPTE tri-level sync and timecode over LTC or ANC VITC, with a stated video delay of two frames over an unbuffered high-speed output or five frames over HDSDI.

The department view

A dedicated Previzion operator, distinct from a general Unreal Engine technician, runs the rack-mounted or 'lunchbox' portable system, since the page states the hardware ships as a 4U rack plus signal breakout or a ruggedized portable unit with a built-in monitor. The lens-metadata list matters most to the camera department and DIT, since it names specific lens-control systems, Preston, CMotion, Cooke, already common on set, rather than a new metadata standard. The trade-off implied is self-sufficiency against flexibility: a built-in render engine and named-protocol lens reading reduce dependence on a separate game engine, at the cost of tying a production to Lightcraft's own rendering feature set.

What to check before you build

This is an editorial checklist. Confirm the company's current status and support availability directly, since this entry relies on an archived 2023 snapshot and the live site no longer serves product content as retrieved. Verify which lens-metadata protocol a given production's lenses actually use against the named list, since Previzion reads specific protocols rather than a universal format. Check whether the built-in render engine's stated polygon and texture limits, up to twelve million polygons and three gigapixels of textures, meet a given scene's complexity before committing to the system.

• Is Lightcraft Technology still operating and supporting Previzion hardware, given the live site's current placeholder state?
• Does the production's lens-control system appear on Previzion's named list of supported metadata protocols?
• Do the render engine's stated polygon, texture and video-plate limits meet this scene's actual complexity?

Lightcraft's own archived documentation describes a self-contained tracking, lens-metadata and rendering stack built around named third-party protocols rather than a single external game engine, a distinct architecture worth weighing against the Unreal-centric approach common elsewhere in this category.