District Cinema is a creative technology studio and virtual production engineering company that bridges the gap between creative ambition and technical workflows in modern filmmaking. At its core, the company specializes in advanced reality capture, software development, and custom Unreal Engine pipelines, creating centimeter-accurate digital twins of real-world locations using technologies like Gaussian Splatting. 

They provide an array of production services — including virtual scouting, in-camera visual effects (ICVFX) and pipeline integration — and have expanded the boundaries of the field by launching platforms like Terra, a browser-based 3D viewer that eliminates the need for expensive hardware or game-engine expertise during early prep. 

District Cinema builds these solutions for major studios, independent filmmakers, enterprise brands, and live-event organizers, enabling production teams to drastically compress timelines, lower location-scouting budgets, and slash their carbon footprints while maintaining total artistic control.

Creative Collaboration

For us, District Cinema is much more than a customer. In fact, Puget Systems is a proud technology partner with the team at District Cinema, as well as a creative collaborator participating in a number of projects, working closely together to help solve challenges with advanced, high-performance hardware solutions.

District Cinema is busy these days, with their hands in a number of projects ranging from live events and conferences — where they conduct enterprise-level scanning of convention centers and media projects —  to sophisticated high-end productions for Apple TV and HBO. We spoke with District Cinema CEO John Makar and his Technical Director, Nolan Kearney, about some of these projects and the work they’re doing with Puget Systems.

For one, Nolan noted that working with Puget Systems and the high-performance hardware we provided enabled them to conduct local testing on new, complex projects — such as Gaussian splat merging and mesh enhancement for post production and visual effects companies like DigitalFilmTree content — without relying on cloud processing.

“The systems that we have from Puget have made local testing very easy with just how reliable and how beefy they are,” said Nolan. “We have a lot of projects that come in simply because of the nature of the work we do with scanning for Gaussian splats. The team from DigitalFilm Tree will often come and ask if we could do things that have just never been done before. And because we have the raw horsepower from our Puget Systems workstations, we can not only do it, but we can do it on a scale that hasn’t been seen before.”

“With our Puget hardware, we can do things like aligning all of the scans, merging all the splats, or reprocessing specific sections or doing the postshot merge. We’re able to perform tests so much faster and reliably, so we can say ‘yes’ much faster to our clients. This has been a game changer for us.”

More recently, the team relied on Puget Systems to process scans for an HBO show,  Roosters, which involved massive mesh extraction. Nolan added, “The machine handled the workload effortlessly.”

Nolan continued, “The Puget Systems hardware had been running nearly 24/7 for six months without a single issue. This reliability for on-prem processing is business-critical because we are simply not allowed to use cloud processing due to strict content security and legal requirements surrounding AI datasets, making local, high-powered computing essential for our workflows.”

Running ‘Hot’ At NAB 2026

At the industry’s largest annual conference, NAB 2026 in Las Vegas, District Cinema and Puget Systems teamed up with Beeble.ai and The VPX Lab to demo a compelling portable virtual production workflow happening off-site on a hotel terrace, all running on laptops from Puget Systems. The demo combined AI relighting, real-time environments, and virtual cameras into a single continuous pipeline, totally eliminating the need for LED volumes or greenscreen.

The idea was to collapse previs, production, and post into one iterative loop, and make the whole thing portable enough to run on location without fixed infrastructure. The pipeline was structured in four stages:

• Scenes were first blocked in virtual environments built with tools such as Terra from District Cinema and Gaussian-splat environments from 3D Reconstruction SLAM Scanners.

• Directors then develop the shots, rehearsing camera moves, staging, and performance in real-time using virtual cameras, markerless motion capture, and environments built in Unreal Engine.

• Live-action footage was then captured on location with cinema cameras and spatial tracking. Without the need for LED volumes or greenscreen, the setup was lightweight and portable, while still capturing the data required for further work downstream.

• Finally, the footage was processed through Beeble’s SwitchLight and SwitchX tools, allowing lighting, environments, and visual context to be reshaped after the shoot rather than locked at the point of capture.

John Makar described the challenge, noting, “For NAB our goal was to showcase a complete Gaussian splat-based pre-vis workflow. We were tracking marker-less motion capture, real time Gaussian splats rendered in Unreal Engine using Volinga, and using iPads as virtual cameras to lens and set up shots on the fly.”

Because they were bringing this demo to the busiest trade show of the year, the set up had to be extremely modular. To accomplish this, they needed hardware powerful enough to run a full mobile Unreal Engine stack to ingest a massive amount of camera data from the mocap system. And because it was a demo, it had to operate flawlessly and in real time.

To add to the challenge, the team was setting up the demo outdoors, in Las Vegas, in 95 degree desert heat — an extreme environmental factor that threatened to derail the entire demo.

“And that’s exactly where Puget showed up,” added John. “At 7:00 a.m., the morning before the live demo, I messaged the support team at Puget saying that I was running into optimization issues because of the extreme heat and trying to push massive amounts of data through the Puget Systems laptops. They messaged me back immediately, essentially saying ‘we got you!’”

“Because of that support,” John added, “we were able to pull off multiple demos under these totally unpredictable conditions. They alleviated a ton of stress!”

Powering Through in the Desert Heat

Future-Proofing Systems

John and Nolan also spoke about how working with Puget Systems and the high-performance hardware we provided enabled them to conduct local testing on new, complex projects for Apple TV, HBO, and many others, all without relying on cloud processing. We also talked about the ‘partnership’ between the two teams, and how it is really about the tight-knit relationship that ensures District Cinema is always several steps ahead of the curve. With the work they’re doing in advanced VFX, ICVFX, and motion capture, it’s critical they are always thinking beyond today’s requirements.

“We are starting to experiment with taking what could be cloud processes and bringing them on-prem because security is so critical to our clients. It is invaluable to us to have a partner like Puget Systems who not only shares our vision for, and understanding of, the future of tech, but also helps us mitigate some of the hardware challenges we face today — like memory shortages and costs. Puget Systems works with us to customize solutions that not only help us today, but future proof us for whatever tomorrow brings.”

District Cinema and Puget Systems: Under the Hood

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Check out District Cinema’s website to learn more about the extensive work they’re doing in advanced reality capture, software development, and custom Unreal Engine pipelines, and to see how they create centimeter-accurate digital twins of real-world locations using technologies like Gaussian Splatting.

For more information about Puget Systems and our tailored VP workstations, check out our recommended systems for Virtual Production workflows.