Blackmagic Design has teased a new camera called URSA Cine Immersive. This new camera in currently still in development, and it is being designed to capture content for Apple Vision Pro with 8160 x 7200 resolution per eye, 16 stops of dynamic range for 90fps stereoscopic 3D immersive cinema content. At the WWDC, Apple also referred to the camera.
The camera is probably based on the Blackmagic URSA Cine 17K platform. You require at least 100 megapixels to create content for the Apple Vision Pro, and the URSA Cine Immersive will be capable of more than doubling that figure.
The Blackmagic URSA Cine also features a custom lens system designed specifically for Blackmagic URSA Cine’s large format image sensors with extremely accurate positional data which is calibrated at the time of manufacturing. There is no current information about the focal length or T-stop of the lenses.
The camera captures content into a Blackmagic RAW Immersive file. The new Blackmagic RAW Immersive file format is an enhanced version of Blackmagic RAW that’s been designed to make immersive video simple to use through the post production workflow.
The immersive lens data is mapped, calibrated and stored per eye into the Blackmagic RAW file so it travels through the post production process in the Blackmagic RAW Immersive file itself. That eliminates the need for multiple files to capture an immersive scene.
This doesn’t come as a huge surprise given Blackmagic Design also announced DaVinci Resolve for immersive video today. Both products will enable users to create high resolution 3D content.
The new updates to DaVinci Resolve will make it the world’s first immersive video editor. There will be a lot of updates and changes to support immersive workflows including a new immersive video viewer which will let editors pan, tilt and roll clips for viewing on 2D monitors. But what’s most exciting is we can even allow clips to be adjusted and monitored on Apple Vision Pro itself for a complete immersive editing experience.
The URSA Cine 17K features a a whopping 65mm sensor. With a horizontal size of 50.80mm and a vertical size of 23.32mm. It has 15,520 x 8,040 pixels. This is probably the exact same sensor that will be in the URSA Cine Immersive.
Above you can see how much larger it is when compared to the 12K URSA Cine.
There are no further details about the URSA Cine Immersive currently available, but the camera will be available later in 2024. This will be a pretty niche and specialized camera and I would imagine it will have a reasonably high price tag.