Making a Whole New Sphere-ience

Virtual reality without the goggles was the elevator pitch behind the MSG Sphere as explained to Andrew Shulkind, SVP of Capture Sphere Entertainment, by James Dolan, the group’s executive chairman.

“James drew a circle on a napkin and said, ‘What if we did this?’ The idea was to completely transform the world of entertainment and what a venue can be.”

Shulkind was speaking at the 2024 NAB Show, sharing how he helped realize the vision that took seven years from napkin to last December’s opening with rock group U2’s residency.

READ MORE: Step Inside: The Spectacle of “U2:UV Achtung Baby Live At Sphere” (NAB Amplify)

For virtually all of that time he was working in the dark, simply because nothing like it had been built before. He explained that initially they had a small LED dome before realizing it wasn’t big enough. The built another quarter-scale dome in Burbank so they could start to get a sense of the actual scale required to create content for the 366-foot-tall, 516-foot-wide dome.

“Imagine, this is so new that every single one of us, even those of us that have been doing it for the last four years, are still discovering new things every day. Internally we’re constantly figuring out new things.”

With a budget that reportedly stretched to $2.3 billion, Sphere features a 16K by 16K-resolution screen. With no commercial camera capable of recording at that resolution without having to stitch together images from a camera array, MSG built its own camera system and a whole post-production workflow, which together comprise Big Sky.

“How do you get something into filmmaker’s hands that they can actually use and tell stories with without being completely limited by the technology? The idea was to make the technology frictionless,” he said.

“Not only did we build the camera and build the lens but we also built other lenses of other fields of view and the media to record it on. Also we had to work out how we could power it with you know regular batteries so we could shoot in other countries.”

The Big Sky single-lens camera boasts a 316-megapixel sensor capable of recording up to 120 frames per second in the 18K square format. A custom media recorder and custom image processing software captures all the data and feeds it to a GPU-accelerated pipeline to make the workflows practical and efficient.

Specialist lenses include a 150-degree field of view, which is true to the view of The Sphere, and a 165-degree field-of-view lens designed for overshoot and stabilization.

Additionally, MSG Entertainment designed a custom media recorder to capture all that data including uncompressed RAW footage at 30 gigabytes per second, with each media magazine containing 32 terabytes and holding approximately 17 minutes of footage.

Sphere’s immersive “sphere-ience” wouldn’t be complete without a tailored audio setup. The 164,000-speaker audio system that can isolate specific sounds, or even limit them to certain parts of the audience, was designed by German audio company Holoplot. That means certain audience sections could listen to a movie in different languages, or even different instruments.

Director Darren Aronofsky and cinematographer Matthew Libatique made Postcards from Earth, one of the first films in Sphere’s format, which includes capacity for seat movement, mist and scent.

READ MORE: It’ll Be a New (New) Media Experience in the MSG Sphere (NAB Amplify)

“You’re in a room with 5,000 other people and the experience is so incredible and [something] you don’t get in a movie theater,” said Deluxe SVP of Innovation Richard Welsh, who also served as moderator.

“Whether it’s emotional or it’s visceral or you’re feeling the kind of movement or there’s anticipation or scale there are elements in Postcards that we were really trying to push. I think it transcends what a screen is because you break the rectangle from the way that we’re accustomed to perceiving images.”

Visuals from Phish’s performances at Sphere

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