Hosts: Philip Grossman, host and co-producer at Visionaries, and Mark Sindyukov. Production – TKT1957 LLC. Airing on June 17, 2024.
Blackmagic RAW Immersive Format for New URSA Cine Camera
Mark: The final technology that I wanted to discuss with you today is something that Blackmagic Design has come out with. They’ve recently teased us with the development of a new camera, the URSA Cine Immersive, designed to capture content for Apple Vision Pro. This is a breakthrough technology and I’d like to know what your opinions are on the URSA camera designed by Blackmagic?
Philip: Yeah, you know, it’s one of those things when you look at Apple. Apple is a driver of industry trends. They’re not always the first; they weren’t first with the smartphone, and they weren’t first with the tablet, but they sort of sit back, and their engineering development UI teams, human interaction teams, really seem to understand the market. They’re the first to really come forward with something I think is going to drive the adoption of VR. We’ve had the Oculus Rift, we’ve had Meta’s offerings, and others making these helmets and systems, but it hasn’t been easy to capture the content.
We’ve had the Oculus Rift, we’ve had Meta’s offerings, and others making these helmets and systems, but it hasn’t been easy to capture the content
Just like with the Canon lens, this camera is a 12K camera, so it’s getting much closer to 6K per eye, moving towards that 8K target. It’s going to make it easier to create this kind of content. From what I understand, they worked with Apple in developing this camera to fit into their ecosystem. This means that I now have a product to give to filmmakers to capture content because content is king. You need that to drive your product offering. For Apple, the visual computing portion is very interesting, but the entertainment aspect is what’s really going to be amazing. Having a solution that I can put on a set of sticks and shoot like a regular film but with immersive capability is going to drive a lot of content and hopefully adoption. I can’t wait until we see the next generation of the Apple Studio or headset, not just the pro version, but the regular Vision.
Mark: Beautiful. Just to summarize everything we’ve discussed today, I wanted to ask you one last detail, and that is about the overall trend I’ve noticed this week with virtual reality (VR) technologies. What are your thoughts on everything that’s going on in the market?
Philip: Yeah, so I think we’ve seen starts and stops with VR over the years; the tech hadn’t quite been there. I think even Apple with its Vision Pro understands that it is not fully optimized. They’ve been looking for tech to scale all this down but couldn’t wait any longer. They are a market driver, and I think their Vision Studio is something the competition will look at. We’re going to have more headsets come out, and I think we’ll eventually get to a standardized format for the material. You’ll see the adoption happen.
I can think of concerts and boxing matches; it would be a great market for pay-per-view
I don’t know if it will be the same as 3D television, which came and went. There are a lot more opportunities for that immersive field with VR. I can think of concerts and boxing matches; it would be a great market for pay-per-view. When they figure out how to stream that content to a headset, I can sit at home and watch a concert. It’s exciting. I’d say we’re probably 36 months away from seeing it become, if not mainstream, then much more in the mainstream.
Mark: Perfect, and I would agree with you. Anyways, this is our time to wrap up. I would like to say thank you again to our expert Philip Grossman. Don’t forget to comment on the news we’ve discussed, leave us a like, follow, and subscription. We try really hard and would like to see everybody next Monday at the same time!
360 Seconds. Broadcast News & Commentary is a weekly program on Youtube about the latest equipment for broadcasting and film. Explained by experts – practitioners directly working in the field of cinema and television.
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