From an $8M Exit to a Virtual Production Studio: Inside Biro Florin’s New MZed Course – Focus Check ep118

by Felix TappeinerMay 28^th, 2026

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In this episode of Focus Check, Nino speaks with Biro Florin — entrepreneur, misfit, and founder of Masterwork Films — about his unconventional path from cosmetics and software to running a green screen virtual production studio in Brighton, UK. They also dive deep into the new Virtual Production for Beginners course now available on MZed, which Biro co-created to help filmmakers, studio owners, and virtual production engineers build their own VP setups from scratch — without the budget of a Hollywood LED volume.

In case you missed it, head over to our article on the course itself here.

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A self-described misfit in the film industry

Biro’s story does not follow the usual trajectory. Born in Romania, he started his first business at 17 — a nationwide hair extensions operation — before moving to the UK in 2011 and pivoting into software. He taught himself web development through Stack Overflow, built a SaaS company called Jexo, and sold it in 2022 for eight million dollars. Only then did he turn his full attention to filmmaking.

The word “misfit” comes up deliberately. Biro sees himself as someone who consistently enters industries he was never trained for — cosmetics, software, film — and uses the outsider perspective as a competitive advantage. It is not a story of starting as a camera assistant or shadowing a DP on set. It is a story of arriving with business acumen, capital, and a soft obsession with researching equipment late into the night.

From SaaS exit to green screen studio

After selling Jexo, Biro took time off, launched a podcast called Misfit Founders, and eventually felt the pull to create again. He had already been building a content studio at home while running his software business — cameras, lights, microphones — and that gradual accumulation became, as he puts it, his “gateway drug” into filmmaking.

The founding of Masterwork Films in 2024 started with a specific problem: producing high-quality course content at scale. Location shoots were expensive. Sets had to be built and torn down. Equipment needed a home. The solution — a dedicated studio space with a green screen cove — opened a door Biro had not expected. He discovered that real-time green screen virtual production, driven largely by Blackmagic hardware and Unreal Engine, had reached a level of quality and accessibility that contradicted every assumption he had about the look of keyed footage.

What the course actually teaches

The Virtual Production for Beginners course now sits at around seven and a half hours and will expand to ten. It is not a deep dive into Unreal Engine, nor is it a home-office green screen setup guide. The target audience is filmmakers and studio owners who are at an inflection point — people who already have or are planning a dedicated space, and want to understand how to equip it for real-time VP work and build a business around it.

The course covers the full stack: stage construction and paint selection, lighting setups, camera choice, motion tracking, audio, Unreal Engine basics, and real-time compositing via Blackmagic’s ATEM and UltraStudio ecosystem. A 100-page workbook accompanies the video content with practical exercises — including spec sheets to help viewers determine what stage size they actually need for the type of work they want to do.

Two additional chapters are in production. The first covers studio best practices and optimisation lessons learned from running Masterwork Films for over a year. The second addresses the business side: pricing, workflow, client acquisition, and the operational thinking that most creatives never received formal training in.

Blackmagic cameras for virtual production

One of the more technical sections of the conversation concerns why Biro recommends Blackmagic cameras — particularly the Studio range — over alternatives like the Sony FX3 or Canon C70. The answer is partly practical (Ethernet connectivity for remote control and tally over a single cable) but more fundamentally about sensor behaviour in real-time keying.

Biro explains that higher dynamic range sensors — like the RED V-RAPTOR he originally used — can work against a clean key in a studio that is not perfectly evenly lit. Because Blackmagic’s UltraKey works by detecting a specific hue of green and removing it precisely, a camera with more latitude will reveal subtle variations in the green across the stage that a smaller sensor would compress away. Less dynamic range, paradoxically, can produce a cleaner key in real-world conditions.

Real-time compositing: hardware versus software

The episode also covers the ongoing debate in the VP community about whether to composite inside Unreal Engine or externally via dedicated hardware. Biro’s setup routes the Unreal Engine virtual camera output through a Blackmagic UltraStudio, where the keyed foreground and the 3D background are combined in real time — outside the rendering computer entirely.

The alternative approach — sending footage into Unreal Engine as a plane and compositing there — has advantages for shadow integration and environmental consistency, but puts more load on a single machine. Biro’s preference for decentralised processing means every function in the signal chain has its own dedicated unit, which he argues produces more stability and flexibility, particularly when running multi-camera podcast and interview formats.

The Unreal Engine section of the course was co-produced with Virtual Division, a team whose members have backgrounds in game development and professional VP work.

AI, commercials, and the democratisation question

A significant portion of the conversation addresses generative AI and its impact on production work. Both Nino and Biro are matter-of-fact about the trajectory: commercial work, in particular, is heading toward AI generation at speed, and pretending otherwise is not a viable position for anyone building a business in this space.

Biro points to the recent premiere of a Higgsfield feature film at Cannes — built entirely from AI-generated footage — as evidence of how quickly the technology is maturing. He pushes back on the idea that AI-generated characters can never carry emotional weight, arguing that audiences have always attached to non-human protagonists, from Toy Story characters onward. The question, in his view, is not whether AI content will find an audience, but whether it will find the right story.

Nino’s counterpoint is that the most defensible position for working filmmakers right now is combining real actors with AI-enhanced production — using generative tools to elevate practical work rather than replace it. Both agree that the demand for content is growing, that AI is a tool rather than a replacement for craft, and that the filmmakers and production companies already integrating both approaches are the ones winning work.

The business of filmmaking

Running through the entire conversation is a thread about the gap between creative skill and business literacy in the film industry. Nino notes that most filmmakers arrive at business ownership from the creative side — camera operators and DPs who eventually have to figure out how to run a company — whereas Biro came from the opposite direction.

That reversal, Biro argues, is exactly why the business chapter of the Virtual Production for Beginners course matters. Concepts that feel like common sense to a seasoned entrepreneur — how to structure an investor agreement, how to price services, how to define what a studio is actually for before building it — are genuinely unfamiliar territory for many creatives. The goal is not to replace deep creative expertise, but to give VP studio founders enough business scaffolding to make the venture sustainable.

The course is available now as part of MZed Pro, starting at $29 per month on the annual plan. An expanded version with the final two chapters is in progress.

You can watch and listen to the full video episode of Focus Check ep118 embedded on top, and find all episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you get your podcasts.