ep131 - Inside the Cirrus Apple Immersive Film: Shooting 180° Stereo From a Plane – CineD Focus Check

Imagine putting on a headset and seven minutes later feeling like you have actually flown a light aircraft over the Grand Canyon. That is the pitch behind the Cirrus app for Apple Vision Pro, and it might be the most convincing case yet for Apple Immersive Video as a commercial format. This week's Focus Check is a special one – not a news episode, but a long-form interview. Nino talks to Anthony Bottini, Director of Media at Cirrus Aircraft, who had to sell this project internally, and to John "JR" Racine of Rogue Labs, who shot and finished it. Five days over the Arizona desert, three Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive cameras, the Top Gun: Maverick aerial team, 25 to 30 terabytes for two hours of footage – and people taking the headset off in tears.   Topics and Chapters in this Episode:   (00:00:00) Cold open: flying the Grand Canyon in a headset (00:01:06) Why Cirrus built an Apple Vision Pro app (00:01:51) Meet John "JR" Racine (Rogue Labs) and Anthony Bottini (Cirrus) (00:03:40) Selling immersive internally: Vision Pros for the global sales team (00:06:10) Five days in the desert: Page, Arizona and the weather (00:06:28) Who did what: Cirrus, Rogue Labs, Blackmagic and XBrand (00:07:59) The weather day that snow-dusted the Grand Canyon (00:09:11) Air-to-air with a fixed 180° lens (00:09:30) Kevin LaRosa, Michael FitzMaurice and the Piper Aerostar camera ship (00:11:23) Rigging and vibration: why nothing was stabilised in post (00:12:11) Why the Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive made this possible (00:13:17) The limits of the medium: shooting inside a cockpit (00:15:30) One BRAW file per shot: the DaVinci Resolve workflow (00:16:16) Fixed focus from the factory (00:17:40) Lens borrowing: winning back 5 to 10 degrees of field of view (00:19:15) Directing the viewer's gaze (00:21:05) 16K, 25 to 30 terabytes and the post pipeline (00:22:33) From a December shoot to a January demo (00:23:32) "A good spatial edit is 50% of the experience" (00:26:52) Measuring success without a big installed base (00:29:35) "I've seen people cry" and the 100% scale aircraft models (00:32:13) One-off, or the start of an immersive programme? (00:34:54) Outro