Netflix open-sources camera-based LED wall calibration

The stage

Netflix published OpenVPCal as open-source software, with its GitHub repository recording a creation date of 6 November 2023, checked 16 September 2026 through the repository's own metadata. The project README describes it as 'an open-source calibration tool for In-Camera Visual Effects pipelines,' stating it was originally developed by Netflix in collaboration with ORCA Studios and first introduced at SIGGRAPH 2022 with an accompanying paper and presentation, ahead of the code's public release the following year. The README states the tool creates colour-space corrections for an LED wall's content pipeline, exportable as an OpenColorIO config or a 'Display-to-Display' 3D LUT, and is released under the Apache-2.0 license.

What the documents establish

The README states the tool's central technique in one line: 'OpenVPCal uses the camera as a colourimeter,' rather than a handheld colorimeter alone, so the calibration accounts for the specific camera-and-lens pairing that will actually shoot the scene, including effects a fixed colorimeter reading would not capture. The releases page shows the project's first tagged version, v1.0.0, dated January 2024, roughly two months after the repository's creation, with a v2.0 release since adding direct camera-footage import. This distinguishes three separate dates worth keeping apart: the 2022 conference introduction of the underlying technique, the November 2023 public code repository, and the January 2024 first tagged release, none of which the documents treat as interchangeable.

The department view

The role this tool serves is the calibration technician's or DIT's, working ahead of a shoot day to correct how an LED wall's actual colour and brightness will register on the specific production camera, rather than to a generic reference. The README frames the trade-off plainly: a camera-based calibration reflects the real capture chain more closely than a colorimeter-only measurement, at the cost of needing the actual camera and lens on hand to run the calibration, rather than a portable meter alone.

What to check before you build

This is an editorial checklist, not a claim in the README. Confirm which OpenVPCal version a facility is running, since the tool has moved from v1.0 to v2.0 with added import features. Verify the calibration is run with the same camera-and-lens pairing that will shoot principal photography, since the technique's stated advantage depends on that match. This entry does not treat OpenVPCal as the only viable calibration method; the README does not claim exclusivity, and other camera-based or colorimeter-based approaches exist outside this document.

• Which OpenVPCal version, and which calibration workflow within it, is this facility actually running?
• Was the calibration performed with the exact camera and lens combination shooting the production?
• Does the pipeline consume the OpenColorIO config, the 3D LUT export, or both, and does downstream software support that format?

Netflix's own repository and README describe a specific, dated open-source tool built around camera-based calibration, with a documented history separating the 2022 introduction of the technique from the 2023 code release that made it usable.