Kirsten Joyce and Justin Walker
18 minutes ago
LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — To create content for a venue of the size and scope of the Sphere, its production team had to create custom technology never before seen outside a lab, make it portable enough to be transported from exotic location to exotic location, and ultimately collect immersive imagery that would be used to transport viewers from one place to another while seated inside the world's largest spherical building.
I had an idea…
Figuratively painting on a canvas as large as the Sphere's 160,000 square foot screen in Las Vegas requires a figurative paintbrush that's as imaginative and powerful as the venue itself.
Andrew Shulkind, senior vice president of capture and innovation at MSG Sphere Studios, shows off the Big Sky camera system, an 18K camera with a Polaroid-sized sensor. (KLAS)
That’s why Andrew Shulkind and the team at MSG Sphere Studios developed Big Sky, a custom-built camera package conceived specifically for the newest addition to the Skyline entertainment capital of the world.
The journey to Big Sky began with a question: How could we deliver such high-definition content to screens that, up until that point, didn't exist?
Pixel Peeping
Sphere's screen is 16,000 x 16,000 pixels, or 16K. Shulkind's team discovered that the small camera sensors currently available to filmmakers couldn't handle the raw pixel load needed to fill Sphere's pixel-hungry screen. For perspective, a typical high-definition display has 2 million pixels, and a 4K TV has over 8 million. Sphere's screen has 256 million pixels.
The team brought 12 state-of-the-art cameras to the site to see what was possible with existing technology. They tried solutions like stitching and warping the camera images to fit the shape of the Sphere's screen. The resulting Frankenstein-like contraption weighed 200 to 300 pounds and wasn't very maneuverable. Shulkind feared he'd have to say “no” to the filmmakers, telling them he couldn't capture the image the artist had in mind.
Instead, they did it themselves. The team set out to build a custom camera: one to exacting specifications, tailored specifically for what would become Sphere. Along with the camera came other demands: custom software was written to manage the images the camera produced, custom compression was created so that the video file sizes were at least manageable, and custom lenses were built that were specifically tuned to fit Sphere's screen.
The giant lens plays a key role in capturing images for display on the Sphere. (KLAS)
This massive lens has an aperture of f/3.5, allowing a ton of light to reach the gigantic Polaroid-sized sensor, giving the Big Sky crew the luxury of using natural lighting on location. Plus, it provides a sharp 165-degree field of view from edge to edge of the image, allowing audiences to view any part of the giant screen without loss of clarity from one point to another.
The Sphere screen geometry is overlaid on Big Sky's 18K image, allowing operators to make critical framing choices in the field. (KLAS)
Mobility
“You can make anything in a lab,” Shulkind said of the Big Sky project, “but to actually be able to suspend it from a helicopter, take it to a volcano, hike into a cave and actually make something is amazing.” […] That's the problem.”
Shulkind believes Big Sky is at least five years ahead of anyone else in the field. He recalled a holy festival in Jaipur, India, for the Sphere Experience, directed by Darren Aronofsky, for Postcard from Earth, a film that will be shown regularly on the Sphere screens since its 2023 release. The film took Big Sky on an adventure across 26 countries on seven continents. None of these shots would have been possible if Big Sky hadn't evolved to a size of over 300 pounds.
It works
Although Big Sky is packed with incredible technology, Schulkind's favorite part of the project is the simplicity.
“This is something you can use,” he said, calling attention to the flood of technology announcements at the Consumer Electronics Show and NAB shows in Las Vegas, “but here we have something that is real, that you can use, the opposite of hype.”
September 28, 2023: Sphere PFE Test (MSG Entertainment)
For now, the team is focused on creating content for the Sphere, a platform that Shulkind believes they're just beginning to explore in earnest: Within this glowing sphere adjacent to the Las Vegas Strip resides a metaphorical portal that could transport viewers from the Nevada desert to anywhere in the world.
“It makes you feel like you're somewhere else,” Shulkind said of the Sphere Experience. “If you feel like you're somewhere else, you can change the world.”
