Firstly, it’s an actual cine camera so has a lot of cine features for reviewing, output, formats that are recorded etc.
Next is the lenses, this has a wider inter pupillary distance so will feel more dimensional and natural. It also has wider coverage.
Then there’s the sensors and readout: this can capture 8K per eye, for 90fps. This is required for the Apple immersive format because it partially surrounds you and so you need 8k per eye to make sure you have good resolution coverage for the portion of the video shown on the 4k per eye display.
There’s no other commercial product that compares to this.
What filmmaker is going to put in all this effort and spend $30K to shoot videos for a single platform that no one uses? At the very least they need to ditch the proprietary format and support Quest and other headsets.
Filmmakers have already been using it to produce the existing immersive video content, so that's kind of a silly question. But it works for VR180, too, if that's your cup o tea.
Moreover, it's not really a proprietary format and you can already play them officially on Quest.
I dunno, Blackmagic clearly collaborates with Apple, and probably would have made this camera regardless of Apple Vision Pro or not, but once the two marketing departments came together, they decide to launch it with Apple Vision Pro filming in mind.
That's not to say it cannot be used for other things. Blackmagic frequently market all their cameras for prosumer/professional film-making, but you can use the cameras for so much more than just recording films, although the marketing is geared towards film-markers. Doesn't make it misleading.
Felix and Paul studios built their own “cameras” for stereoscopic 3D back before even the Oculus dev kits were widely available. There is an ecosystem of similar studios that did this, and that is where the better stuff on the Meta Quests comes from.
If you pay attention in their work you can see how they try to hide the hard drive array that was required, and sometimes also the accountant holding on to it so that it doesn’t get swept away.
Yes. Because it's twice the cost of the URSA Cine.
The equivalent to the Cine from other makers starts at the $30k and goes up depending on what options you want. Except, at those prices, you're only getting 4K. Red, Arri, Sony, etc won't even get out of bed for anything less than $30k.
That's just BMD's DNA to give the customer so much bang for their buck. Every thing they offer is so much lower MSRPs than competitors. I remember when they first released Resolve for Mac, for free after BMD acquired DaVinci. Of course it couldn't do much without a $20k MacPro build, but the software was free. This was running right next to the $50k Resolve Linux build, so naturally it was jaw dropping.
Yeah, the $30k is a drop in the bucket of the many millions you need for a modern production. The real cost will be the editing to make sure it's actually a good experience.
Vision Pro has been released for near a year now. I don't think it got the traction that's anywhere close to the hype when it was first announced. Not even among VR enthusiasts, let alone the mass consumer market.
There is an Apple Store near where I live. When I walk by it, 9 out of 10 times there is nobody around the Vision Pro booth, when many people are playing with iPhones and iPads.
The Vision Pro also doesn't exist in a vacuum - Meta have spent much longer trying to make this work, with hardware that's literally an order of magnitude more affordable, and are still struggling to find any mainstream adoption.
Honestly, I'd say that the vision pro is going to get less traction with VR enthusiasts because it's not that much better in some respects, and much worse in many others. The vision pro is much more suited to people who haven't used any VR before.
Most of the world is facing affordability problems. A $3500 helmet is not top of mind for anyone. Apple isn't going throw money at this for much longer I feel. Immersive videos are not a selling point when considering the tradeoffs of using a headset.
It's obviously going to get cheaper, but rumor is the second generation will only get the price down to about $2000 which is still well above the "lol nope" threshold for most people. Third times the charm?
I research live-action anime[0] and this looks really cool, especially if there's fine-grained control over each sensor and especially if you can change the lenses (in a supported or unsupported manner).
Anime has the advantage of being drawn frame-by-frame, thus able to "change" lenses, cameras, etc mid action-packed shots. Using this may allow for shooting two different setups at once, achieving a similar effect.
In the late 90's I think, there was a movie where a neural device was created that allowed anyone to "record" their brain activity so that it could be replayed later by anyone with a device for that. But it became like a drug as people got addicted to it and couldn't stop living the virtual experiences of others (this was a long time ago so I hope I remember the story correctly)! Some people wanted to experience murdering someone, or having sex with a famous person... cool stuff :D Anyone knows which movie was that?
Which, amusingly, required development of a customized camera to film:
> The film's SQUID scenes, which offer a point-of-view shot, required multi-faceted cameras and considerable technical preparation.[5] A full year was spent building a specialized camera that could reproduce the effect of looking through someone else's eyes.[5] Bigelow revealed that it was essentially "a stripped-down Arri that weighed much less than the smallest EYMO and yet it would take all the prime lenses.
It's an unfairly forgotten film. Much like Blade Runner, it suffers from a clunky plot but has quite smart world building.
Strange Days. Tom Sizemoore's best. "The issue's not whether you're paranoid, Lenny, I mean look at this shit, the issue is whether you're paranoid enough."
Is anyone making movies specifically for the Vision Pro? Apple could certainly afford to sponsor a few films to bolster their catalogue. Although for a creative the tiny potential audience makes it seem very unappealing.
Then again... Maybe if AVP owners represent an audience that you'd like to target it wouldn't be a bad decision. Everyone that owns one will probably be starved for special content and I'd imagine they'd be willing to buy something specifically made for their niche platform.
Apple looks to be getting out of the feature movie business in general and focusing on TV where it is seeing a lot more success.
But based on the Vision Pro demo I would expect to see them prioritise non-fiction content e.g. Planet Earth style movies, concerts, athlete profiles etc.
I'd argue that (similarly to 3D captured footage) you can just record both formats in the same time so you can still target the big audience. Wouldn't wonder if we're going to see few Apple TV exclusives which are in "normal" 4K and also offer Immersive View for Vision Pro owners.
Unfortunately the Immersive Video seems to be a proprietary format. Also if I understood correctly you can't even edit this format right now cause DaVinci Resolve is missing an update for that...
I've seen people edit 180 videos in Resolve for quite some time. I don't find any details on the various formats it can output, but surely at least one of them will be editable if you have the camera today.
The article you linked mentions it uses BRAW which is indeed supported in Resolve today already.
Given Blackmagic is a brand well-known for using their own proprietary format, for actually selling cameras boasting CinemaDNG support that they after the fact quietly disable in favour of BRAW, they are hardly a good choice for someone who cares about interoperability and open standards.
What I see from the PR [0] is that it's using a new BRAW version ('The new Blackmagic RAW Immersive file format...)'. So it's as open as BRAW, that is, not much. But at least (I guess/hope...) you should be able to export each "eye" separately in a different format.
Converting to the "Apple Vision Pro" format is the last step on the pipeline, after editing.
"There is an included 8TB Blackmagic Media Module that is able to store approximately two hours of 8K stereoscopic video recorded in Blackmagic RAW, and Cloud Store is supported for fast media uploads and synchronization."
Um, okay, what is supported and what is achievable are two entirely different things. Even with the fattest of pipes, uploading media content to the cloud is only considered fast if you're a turtle or a snail. Even with 12Gbps connection it takes 10-12 minutes to transfer 250GB files.
8TB for 2hrs of footage is crazy even compared to other high end cinema camera, going to be an interesting work flow for anyone editing this as thats not a a trivial amount of data even by today's standards
> going to be an interesting work flow for anyone editing this
We've had techniques for editing videos on underpowered PCs since the 1990s. Possibly earlier.
You use something called a "proxy workflow": For each 8K source video, generate a 480p "proxy" with the same frame timing but a much more manageable amount of data. You edit the entire film using the 480p videos. Then once you're happy you "render" the video - which swaps the high quality sources back in and produces an output file. The final render might take all weekend for an hour-long video - but you've only got to do it once.
> is crazy even compared to other high end cinema camera
Is it really? I haven't touched "high end cinema cameras" but if my consumer camera can generate ~1TB/hour and it's a "normal" consumer camera, I'd easily expect 4x that in high end cinema gear for 3D video (multiple videos stitched into one essentially)
But again, haven't used any of those or looked it up, so what do I know. It doesn't sound outlandish to me though.
Fair, maybe "prosumer" is more fitting, was thinking of the Pocket Cinema 6K (also from Blackmagic). Not exactly "high end cinema camera" so I still think the data rate doesn't sound out of the world.
Raw 8K video at 60 fps out of something like a Nikon Z8 is around 1.5 TB/hour, 400-500 MB/s.
Of course most people wouldn't shoot at 60 fps for historical reasons, and raw video codecs are intra-only so data rate scales linearly with fps. They're just relatively heavily lossily compressed raw images in a box, basically.
To prevent causing issues upstream you would want to write to a fast NVME SSD first before backing up to a HDD array. Unfortunately, it doesn't support this use case as the NAS is designed for movie streaming, offices, security cameras etc.
The coolest part about AVP is being able to look around in an immersive environment; this seems like it’s only going to give you 3D but not immersive correct?
You’ll turn your head and the image will just stay fixed in 3D in front of you?
Thank you for your insightful comment. You’ve clearly thought about this more than the business who decided to make the camera, and your logic is impeccable.
What does this get you, that the ~$2k Canon Dual Fisheye 3D VR Lens not get you?
https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/rf5-2mm-f2-8-l-dual-fisheye...
A lot!
Firstly, it’s an actual cine camera so has a lot of cine features for reviewing, output, formats that are recorded etc.
Next is the lenses, this has a wider inter pupillary distance so will feel more dimensional and natural. It also has wider coverage.
Then there’s the sensors and readout: this can capture 8K per eye, for 90fps. This is required for the Apple immersive format because it partially surrounds you and so you need 8k per eye to make sure you have good resolution coverage for the portion of the video shown on the 4k per eye display.
There’s no other commercial product that compares to this.
What filmmaker is going to put in all this effort and spend $30K to shoot videos for a single platform that no one uses? At the very least they need to ditch the proprietary format and support Quest and other headsets.
Filmmakers have already been using it to produce the existing immersive video content, so that's kind of a silly question. But it works for VR180, too, if that's your cup o tea.
Moreover, it's not really a proprietary format and you can already play them officially on Quest.
You are mistaken in your last point. The Quest doesn’t play the Apple Immersive video formats, only their MV-HEVC stereo format.
Nobody has been able to extract Apples immersive videos yet and I’m not convinced the Quest has the decoding power for it.
So title is misleading. It shoots videos for other platforms as well.
I dunno, Blackmagic clearly collaborates with Apple, and probably would have made this camera regardless of Apple Vision Pro or not, but once the two marketing departments came together, they decide to launch it with Apple Vision Pro filming in mind.
That's not to say it cannot be used for other things. Blackmagic frequently market all their cameras for prosumer/professional film-making, but you can use the cameras for so much more than just recording films, although the marketing is geared towards film-markers. Doesn't make it misleading.
Felix and Paul studios built their own “cameras” for stereoscopic 3D back before even the Oculus dev kits were widely available. There is an ecosystem of similar studios that did this, and that is where the better stuff on the Meta Quests comes from.
If you pay attention in their work you can see how they try to hide the hard drive array that was required, and sometimes also the accountant holding on to it so that it doesn’t get swept away.
$30k is not particularly expensive for a cinema camera
It is rather expensive for BMD though. It's not like this is the full set of panels for Resolve with that price tag.
This is the same cost as the standard Ursa Cine 17k however that it is derived from https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/media/release/20240912-03
Is it though? Two URSA Cine would run about the same cost, and this camera effectively are two URSA Cines put into one.
Yes. Because it's twice the cost of the URSA Cine.
The equivalent to the Cine from other makers starts at the $30k and goes up depending on what options you want. Except, at those prices, you're only getting 4K. Red, Arri, Sony, etc won't even get out of bed for anything less than $30k.
That's just BMD's DNA to give the customer so much bang for their buck. Every thing they offer is so much lower MSRPs than competitors. I remember when they first released Resolve for Mac, for free after BMD acquired DaVinci. Of course it couldn't do much without a $20k MacPro build, but the software was free. This was running right next to the $50k Resolve Linux build, so naturally it was jaw dropping.
Yeah, the $30k is a drop in the bucket of the many millions you need for a modern production. The real cost will be the editing to make sure it's actually a good experience.
Don’t filmmakers rent cameras for a few days/weeks?
Almost always.
Yes.
Filmmakers funded by apple.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Studios
MKBHD will probably race over to buy or cover that piece of equipment. Hopefully no tickets for speeding will occur.
Are you implying the Vison Pro ecosystem is dead and Apple will abandon it? Sometimes the supporting hardware takes time to manifest itself.
You also have the Meta Quest 3 trucking along. That one is desperate for higher-quality 3D videos.
takes time -- how long are we talking about here?
Vision Pro has been released for near a year now. I don't think it got the traction that's anywhere close to the hype when it was first announced. Not even among VR enthusiasts, let alone the mass consumer market.
There is an Apple Store near where I live. When I walk by it, 9 out of 10 times there is nobody around the Vision Pro booth, when many people are playing with iPhones and iPads.
The Vision Pro also doesn't exist in a vacuum - Meta have spent much longer trying to make this work, with hardware that's literally an order of magnitude more affordable, and are still struggling to find any mainstream adoption.
Honestly, I'd say that the vision pro is going to get less traction with VR enthusiasts because it's not that much better in some respects, and much worse in many others. The vision pro is much more suited to people who haven't used any VR before.
Most of the world is facing affordability problems. A $3500 helmet is not top of mind for anyone. Apple isn't going throw money at this for much longer I feel. Immersive videos are not a selling point when considering the tradeoffs of using a headset.
At the current price point, the AVP is destined to achieve a market position similar to LaserDisc.
It's obviously going to get cheaper, but rumor is the second generation will only get the price down to about $2000 which is still well above the "lol nope" threshold for most people. Third times the charm?
https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/13/apple-might-release-a-2000...
Hopefully, but I don't think it's obvious. We don't seem to be currently in an era of plummeting hardware prices.
> What filmmaker is going to put in all this effort and spend $30K to shoot videos
Pornographers
Website announcement, https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/blackmagicursacine..., doesn't even mention the Vision Pro and refers to Apple once.
You’re looking at the wrong product. That’s the Ursa Cine 17k not the Ursa Cine Immersive.
This is the page you want https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/media/release/20241217-01
But they refer to it in a tweet that is linked from the article
https://x.com/Blackmagic_News/status/1868723512455970999
On the preorder page they're talking about the "URSA Cine Immersive":
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/blackmagicursacine...
which seems to be more in line what the article talks about
That's the page for their normal, non-3D, non-VR cinema camera.
That's the wrong page, wrong product
I research live-action anime[0] and this looks really cool, especially if there's fine-grained control over each sensor and especially if you can change the lenses (in a supported or unsupported manner).
Anime has the advantage of being drawn frame-by-frame, thus able to "change" lenses, cameras, etc mid action-packed shots. Using this may allow for shooting two different setups at once, achieving a similar effect.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/@weedonandscott
Not only anime, but other types of animation as well. :)
In the late 90's I think, there was a movie where a neural device was created that allowed anyone to "record" their brain activity so that it could be replayed later by anyone with a device for that. But it became like a drug as people got addicted to it and couldn't stop living the virtual experiences of others (this was a long time ago so I hope I remember the story correctly)! Some people wanted to experience murdering someone, or having sex with a famous person... cool stuff :D Anyone knows which movie was that?
Anyway, this feels like the beginning of that.
> Anyone knows which movie was that?
Strange Days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Days_(film)
Which, amusingly, required development of a customized camera to film:
> The film's SQUID scenes, which offer a point-of-view shot, required multi-faceted cameras and considerable technical preparation.[5] A full year was spent building a specialized camera that could reproduce the effect of looking through someone else's eyes.[5] Bigelow revealed that it was essentially "a stripped-down Arri that weighed much less than the smallest EYMO and yet it would take all the prime lenses.
It's an unfairly forgotten film. Much like Blade Runner, it suffers from a clunky plot but has quite smart world building.
In Neuromancer(1984) it's called Simstim. I think Strange Days got it from there.
Fragments of a Hologram Rose (1977) also by Gibson already had this.
Does anybody know even earlier instances?
You mean every other plot involving brain computer interfaces since the 1950's?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction)
It's either STRANGE DAYS or EXISTENZ - maybe BRAINSTORM but that was early 80s
We will probably go through:
Thoughts -> (electric signal) -> LLM decoding and calling a generative model -> (electric signal) -> Brain
Could be Brainstorm (1983) perhaps?
Also, see the last episode of season one of Black Mirror.
And "brain dances" in Cyberpunk 2077.
I think that it’s a Black Mirror episode: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You
Strange Days. Tom Sizemoore's best. "The issue's not whether you're paranoid, Lenny, I mean look at this shit, the issue is whether you're paranoid enough."
Strange Days.
Brainstorm (1983)?
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0085271/
No, you are all wrong. I had this idea first!! When I was 8.
How many vision pros did they sell and how many people are still using them?
Is anyone making movies specifically for the Vision Pro? Apple could certainly afford to sponsor a few films to bolster their catalogue. Although for a creative the tiny potential audience makes it seem very unappealing.
Then again... Maybe if AVP owners represent an audience that you'd like to target it wouldn't be a bad decision. Everyone that owns one will probably be starved for special content and I'd imagine they'd be willing to buy something specifically made for their niche platform.
Apple has commissioned Submerged, the first scripted short film captured in Apple Immersive Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYJcUtVIB_g
Apple looks to be getting out of the feature movie business in general and focusing on TV where it is seeing a lot more success.
But based on the Vision Pro demo I would expect to see them prioritise non-fiction content e.g. Planet Earth style movies, concerts, athlete profiles etc.
I'd argue that (similarly to 3D captured footage) you can just record both formats in the same time so you can still target the big audience. Wouldn't wonder if we're going to see few Apple TV exclusives which are in "normal" 4K and also offer Immersive View for Vision Pro owners.
I think the answer it's in the Blackmagic website:
>the world’s first advanced cinema camera designed to shoot for Apple Immersive Video
I think they are tapping early into an emerging "new" video format.
3D TV back at it again.
Cool! Though I sincerely hope it's not using some Apple proprietary format that won't work with non-Apple devices.
Unfortunately the Immersive Video seems to be a proprietary format. Also if I understood correctly you can't even edit this format right now cause DaVinci Resolve is missing an update for that...
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/uk/media/release/20241217-0...
I've seen people edit 180 videos in Resolve for quite some time. I don't find any details on the various formats it can output, but surely at least one of them will be editable if you have the camera today.
The article you linked mentions it uses BRAW which is indeed supported in Resolve today already.
Given Blackmagic is a brand well-known for using their own proprietary format, for actually selling cameras boasting CinemaDNG support that they after the fact quietly disable in favour of BRAW, they are hardly a good choice for someone who cares about interoperability and open standards.
What I see from the PR [0] is that it's using a new BRAW version ('The new Blackmagic RAW Immersive file format...)'. So it's as open as BRAW, that is, not much. But at least (I guess/hope...) you should be able to export each "eye" separately in a different format.
Converting to the "Apple Vision Pro" format is the last step on the pipeline, after editing.
Wasn’t that due to RED patents?
Which open format can handle this kind of video? The Cineform video codec can store stereo video, but I don't know if it would be suitable for this.
"There is an included 8TB Blackmagic Media Module that is able to store approximately two hours of 8K stereoscopic video recorded in Blackmagic RAW, and Cloud Store is supported for fast media uploads and synchronization."
Um, okay, what is supported and what is achievable are two entirely different things. Even with the fattest of pipes, uploading media content to the cloud is only considered fast if you're a turtle or a snail. Even with 12Gbps connection it takes 10-12 minutes to transfer 250GB files.
8TB for 2hrs of footage is crazy even compared to other high end cinema camera, going to be an interesting work flow for anyone editing this as thats not a a trivial amount of data even by today's standards
> going to be an interesting work flow for anyone editing this
We've had techniques for editing videos on underpowered PCs since the 1990s. Possibly earlier.
You use something called a "proxy workflow": For each 8K source video, generate a 480p "proxy" with the same frame timing but a much more manageable amount of data. You edit the entire film using the 480p videos. Then once you're happy you "render" the video - which swaps the high quality sources back in and produces an output file. The final render might take all weekend for an hour-long video - but you've only got to do it once.
> is crazy even compared to other high end cinema camera
Is it really? I haven't touched "high end cinema cameras" but if my consumer camera can generate ~1TB/hour and it's a "normal" consumer camera, I'd easily expect 4x that in high end cinema gear for 3D video (multiple videos stitched into one essentially)
But again, haven't used any of those or looked it up, so what do I know. It doesn't sound outlandish to me though.
> if my consumer camera can generate ~1TB/hour and it's a "normal" consumer camera
If your consumer camera generates 1TB/hour then you're generating data as fast as a Red Komodo [1] recording at 6K "VFX, Extreme Detail Scenes"
Consumer quality? A high-end iphone can record 4K 60FPS video and an hour's footage takes up 24 gigabytes.
And you're watching 4K 60fps video on Netflix? Youtube? Maybe 12 gigabytes an hour.
[1] https://www.red.com/komodo
Fair, maybe "prosumer" is more fitting, was thinking of the Pocket Cinema 6K (also from Blackmagic). Not exactly "high end cinema camera" so I still think the data rate doesn't sound out of the world.
Raw 8K video at 60 fps out of something like a Nikon Z8 is around 1.5 TB/hour, 400-500 MB/s.
Of course most people wouldn't shoot at 60 fps for historical reasons, and raw video codecs are intra-only so data rate scales linearly with fps. They're just relatively heavily lossily compressed raw images in a box, basically.
Seems like Synology NAS with 10Gbit Ethernet is the way to go, based on the research I’ve done so far.
Does anyone have better ideas?
Thunderbolt external raid is better, for a solo video editor.
There are options from caldigit on the low end: https://www.caldigit.com/t4/
or qnap on the mid end: https://www.qnap.com/en/product/tvs-h874t
OCuLink or CameraLink also come to mind.
Synology wouldn't work well here.
To prevent causing issues upstream you would want to write to a fast NVME SSD first before backing up to a HDD array. Unfortunately, it doesn't support this use case as the NAS is designed for movie streaming, offices, security cameras etc.
Well, the bottleneck is probably getting that off the camera somehow, rather than how to get it elsewhere once off the camera.
10Gbit would be the bare minimum, 8TB at 10Gbit would take 1h46mins. Assuming the disks aren't bottlenecked, which means SSDs.
The coolest part about AVP is being able to look around in an immersive environment; this seems like it’s only going to give you 3D but not immersive correct?
You’ll turn your head and the image will just stay fixed in 3D in front of you?
HAHAHA talk about a niche for a niche for a niche. What's the expected sales for this one? In the double digits? Single?
It's just a camera. Nothing stops filmmakers to publish the results for any VR platforms they want.
Thank you for your insightful comment. You’ve clearly thought about this more than the business who decided to make the camera, and your logic is impeccable.