Back in March, Apple Vision Pro customers were gifted a new experience called Debut at the BBC Proms, a 35-minute Apple Immersive Video concert featuring Lukas Sternath performing Grieg at Royal Albert Hall.
Now a wonderful behind-the-scenes interview with director Ian Russell shows what it took to film classical music for Vision Pro.
According to CineD, the production used five Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive cameras, each with two 8K sensors, and was produced by Livewire Pictures for BBC Arts. Russell says this was not just a Vision Pro version of a normal BBC broadcast.
“This was a completely separate recording,” Russell told us. “There was obviously an audio recording made, but the only video recording made of Lukas’s concert was the Apple Immersive recording.”
The interview digs into the practical and creative constraints: fixed 180-degree lenses, limited room around a full orchestra, Apple’s guidance to keep the cameras roughly a meter away from objects, and the challenge of directing when viewers can look wherever they want.
Russell described the challenge of the new experience bluntly:
“In some ways, this was like going back to when I first started directing television programs. It was like learning something from scratch again. I felt like a fish out of water. I felt like I had to throw away a lot of what I knew, a lot of the normal processes and practices that we would use, and be prepared to start again from scratch.”
Post-production sounds equally early-days. CineD notes that test renders could take around half an hour for short clips, but Russell still sounds eager to keep experimenting:
“It was like going back to the very beginnings of non-linear editing. If you wanted to try something on a three-minute clip of the piece, it might take two or three hours to render that clip. You very quickly learn that you had to try these things in sort of 30-second bites, and even that would take half an hour to render sometimes. If it didn’t work and you wanted to adjust something slightly, it was another half an hour before you could find out the results. That very slow incremental step of adjusting things was a flashback to those early days of nonlinear.”
Check out the video below, and read the full piece here:
Apple Immersive Video remains one of the clearest reasons to try Vision Pro, and the format is still early enough that these production stories are often as interesting as the finished films.
Apple is also continuing to build out the platform in software. visionOS 27 adds new Vision Pro features. Some of the newest upgrades are specific to M5 Vision Pro hardware.
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Zac covers Apple news, hosts the 9to5Mac Happy Hour podcast, and created SpaceExplored.com.
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