Summary of Creative Intent

Our primary goal with this production was to marry state of the art immersive video with live recorded audio presented in the highest possible fidelity and spatial resolution. It's meant to showcase the importance of audio to the immersive experience and illustrate what is possible when audio is at the forefront. The audio here is every bit as cutting edge and experimental as the video! Blackguard Immersive originated from our audio business - we've been leaders in immersive audio capture since 2018!

Tech

• Shot on the Black Magic Ursa Cine Immersive for Apple Vision Pro

• Edited and compressed in Davinci Resolve

• Audio capture via 7.0.4 Schoeps PCMA-3D Array, ambisonics and mono microphones

• Audio mixed in Pro Tools and delivered in Apple Spatial Audio format (ASAF)

• Quality control on Apple Vision Pro

Blackmagic Ursa Cine Immersive w/ Immersive Microphone Setup

Technique and Production Notes

Video

While the setting may appear to be simpler compared to our sports shoots, moving inside introduces significant production hurdles. The biggest issue shooting inside with the Ursa Cine immersive cinema camera is light. The camera is not terribly light sensitive to start with. It has a native ISO of 800 which isn’t too odd in the cinema world, but once you factor in the fixed F4.5 lenses and a frame rate of 90fps, it is more like shooting at somewhere between F11 and F16. 

This means pretty much any time you go inside with this camera, you are going to need a significant amount of light. Luckily with the advent of low power consumption LED lights, you can push quite a bit of light off of a standard household outlet. For this shoot we used a double stack of Skypanel X’s with the diffusion modifier. 

If you want to avoid seeing the lights in frame, you also need to have enough punch from the lights to hit your exposure at a distance, and ideally the fixture is big enough or going through a modifier to keep it from looking too harsh. If anything, we technically underexposed by about a half stop on this one and had to push it just a bit in post. The footage from this camera gets noisy pretty quickly when you have to push it, so this resulted in some mild noise reduction. It’s not really an extra step though as we advise noise reduction for any assets shot on this camera. Unfortunately, even mild noise when viewed stereooptically breaks immersion as it just appears as a sort of unnatural shimmer in the footage.

Audio

• We deployed a 7.0.4 (11 mic) immersive array. Specifically, the PCMA-3D array (v1).

• Additional capture included ambisonics, Decca Tree, and mono / stereo spot mics for each instrument. A total of 22 microphones were used to record the quartet!

• The mix was done in Dolby Atmos 9.1.6 and then encoded into 5th Order Ambisonics for use as a bed in ASAF. This preserved high definition head-tracking, while maintaining the highest possible sound quality that comes with a studio mix.

• For the true audio nerds, our process was meticulously documented in our audio blog.

Watch Now

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Video files are provided for demonstration purposes only and are the intellectual property of Blackguard Immersive, Full Sail University, and Eric Jacobsen. Unauthorized distribution is forbidden.