VES's newest release maps on-set data, not VP adoption rates

The stage

On 30 April 2026, the Visual Effects Society released its On-Set VFX Data Collection and Usage Guide, developed over the preceding year by the VES Technology Committee and led by Sheena Duggal, with contributions from Sam Richards, Jim Geduldick and Jake Morrison. The Guide maps the major on-set data sets, from LiDAR scans to camera and lens metadata, their capture methods and intended stakeholders, and is licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0. It is a workflow and terminology document, not a market-adoption survey: VES describes it as a shared playbook for productions, vendors and technology teams to capture on-set data more effectively, with no claim to measure how widely virtual production has been adopted.

What the documents establish

VES quotes contributing author Jim Geduldick: in today's hybrid of real-time virtual production, AI, and traditional pipelines, the VFX department is responsible for not just post, but on-set data capture, continuity, and asset integrity from pre-production through final delivery. That is VES's framing of why the Guide exists, not a quantified adoption figure. A second VES page, its Virtual Production Resources hub, retrieved 16 September 2026, states the Society runs this resource with the VES Technology Committee and the industry's Virtual Production Committee and is actively soliciting a member survey to shape future programming, rather than presenting a completed adoption-trend report. Together, the documents establish that VES's current, verifiable output is a workflow standardization guide and an open call for input, not a census of how the practice has changed year over year.

The department view

The Guide speaks to the on-set VFX supervisor and the data-wrangling role that emerged because volumes and real-time pipelines generate capture data continuously. VES states the intent is to let data captured for one purpose, citing LiDAR scans, be repurposed by departments such as set construction or stunt planning, needing a shared vocabulary the Guide provides. The acknowledged trade-off is that this depends on communicating clearly, in Duggal's words, across departments that have not shared data infrastructure, and the Guide is a first documentation step, not a built tool.

What to check before you build

This is editorial guidance beyond what VES claims. A production should confirm which on-set data sets named in the Guide it already captures, since the document maps categories rather than mandating them; whether its VFX, virtual-production and production departments have agreed on the Guide's shared terminology before relying on it; and whether any statistic about virtual-production adoption cited elsewhere actually traces to a VES report, since VES's page describes a survey in progress, not published findings.

• Which on-set data categories in the Guide does our production already capture, and which are we missing?
• Have VFX, virtual-production and production departments agreed on shared terms before the data changes hands?
• Is a cited VP-adoption statistic actually sourced to a published VES report, or to something else entirely?

The Visual Effects Society's most recent, checkable virtual-production output is a documented data-workflow standard, attributed to named authors and licensed for reuse, not an industry census. Treating it as the latter would overstate what the Society has published as of this entry's date.