Ok I have seen that video and I do think that's a nice technique for a pretty decent number of shots, but it's not a universal thing that works for every scene. He's got a lot of really good tutorials for both Daz and Renpy and I've watched a ton of his stuff. One of my favorite videos of his shows you how to create a really nice gallery in Renpy. I think he does some photography videos as well.
He's basically turning a good chunk of the scene except for the character and the chair she's sitting on into an HDRI. So that bakes the lighting into the background which can then be used for the render of just the character and the chair. But that kind of requires you to be putting the characters pretty much dead center in the HDRI or the background gets very distorted.
It's a good technique for scenes where you want a bunch of close ups for characters that are dead center in the HDRI and doesn't include shadows or reflections of the character on things that are part of the HDRI. It doesn't work if you want a shot where the character is closer to the edge of the HDRI. You would have to make a new HDRI centered on that spot. It also doesn't work if you're going to take shots that are not close ups where you want to show lighting effects or reflections cast onto the background.
It would work great for something like a well lit scene out by the pool showing a close up of the girls tanning, or a scene in the living room focused on the characters watching TV on the couch. But it wouldn't work for a scene where you have 1 or more characters spread out a little instead of being dead center in the shot or where you wanted to show lighting effects or reflections against a window/mirror or other reflective surface in the background.
Being an HDRI, it's still only providing a single light source so if you wanted to represent a background that had more than 1 source of directional lighting you would still have to set up separate lights to do that which would be fine for creating shadows and lighting effects in a close up shot focused on something like a character in a chair but would not work for a scene where you were zoomed out a bit and wanted lighting effects shown on things that are part of the HDRI.
Creating an HDRI like that is basically giving you an effect similar to just rendering the background separately from each camera position you're rendering from, with the caveat that it also provides a single light source as well. So it saves you time if you're using several camera angles for a close up scene in the center of the HDRI, especially if it's something like an outdoor scene where the only light source is the sun. In a scene like that the HDRI is the only light source you need.
In my experience HDRIs work best to show something like an outdoor scene outside the window of a scene that's really focused on what's going on inside, where you don't expect the outdoor stuff to really be the focus of the scene. In fact in a lot of cases you might have depth of field turned on making the stuff in the HDRI intentionally blurry. It's much better than using a billboard for something like that.
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