(bright music)
- [Narrator] In July,
The Sphere switched on for the first time,
dominating the Las Vegas skyline.
- Oh, I don't think he likes it.
- [Narrator] But inside the 366 foot tall dome...
(upbeat music)
- We are not outside. - Oh, I know.
- [Narrator] Is an even more incredible
immersive experience.
The dome holds the world's largest high definition screen,
160,000 square feet,
nearly 20 times the size of the largest IMAX screen.
But the screen is just one piece
of groundbreaking technology made for this venue.
To create content for the screen,
Sphere needed a new camera to shoot it.
This is the tech behind The Sphere.
When director Darren Aronofsky set out to make
"Postcard From Earth," a movie exclusive to The Sphere,
featuring immersive scenes from all around the world,
his team started shooting on this camera,
or rather cameras.
- When I first showed up,
it was 11 reds welded together in the kind of Frankenstein.
- [Narrator] But combining the views
from those 11 cameras made it difficult to shoot and edit.
- So that led us to design the big sky camera system
as well as the lens system to take
all those different perspectives on the 11 different lenses,
but make it one perspective so it feels like your eyes work.
- [Narrator] This is Deanan Dasilva,
chief architect of the big sky camera.
He walked us through Sphere's Camera Lab in California.
- That's amazing to have a tool which is so sensitive
and be that versatile with it,
is really just an amazing tool to have.
- [Narrator] Filming content for Sphere
has two big challenges.
It needs a camera that can shoot at a very wide angle
and at a super high resolution.
To get that super wide angle,
big sky uses a giant version of a fisheye lens,
almost a foot in diameter.
It makes a circular linear image,
which distorts the view in order to capture
a wider angle in a circle.
Then as light passes through the lens,
it imprints itself on a sensor which breaks it
into tiny squares of color called pixels.
Larger pixels allow the camera
to capture more light and more detail.
So to capture a higher amount of large pixels
for a screen the size of the sphere,
you need a bigger sensor than a screen the size of,
say, your phone.
Some of those pixels are wasted
on a normal rectangular sensor
since a circle doesn't take up the full frame.
But... - That circle
captured from that lens is projected onto the sensor
in a circular format and that circle fits perfectly
in a square sensor rather than a rectangular sensor.
- [Narrator] The lens and sensor come together
to create the massive and super clear field of view
needed for The Sphere's screen.
To test this, we took the camera
just outside the camera lab.
This is how a camera with a flat lens and smaller sensor
saw this area, compared to how big sky saw it.
The field of view reaches almost behind the lens.
Here you can see a glimpse of Deanan
standing just off to the side behind big sky.
- Instead of shooting horizontally,
we tilt up so that we can capture the full field of view
that is natural in The Sphere for where you're sitting.
- [Narrator] The tilt helps the camera line up
with the horizon, this line here on the screen,
because when that circular image is transformed into 3D,
that is the spot that needs to look
the most normal to the audience.
The team on set can check
that the view looks natural with this,
a VR headset that creates a live simulation of the footage
on the sphere screen.
But to get a real preview
of what the footage will look like in Sphere,
the team takes the footage down the street to here,
The Big Dome, a quarter sized version
of The Sphere they use for testing.
This is a prototype of the screen panels in The Sphere.
- They're effectively 32 LEDs in a foot
and when you scale that up to the venue,
that's how we get to 16K,
that gives the illusion of being there.
- [Narrator] Each of these lights
make up one pixel of the screen,
about 170 million in total
that wrap around and above
the nearly 18,000 seats in the theater.
That makes up the 16K by 16K resolution,
which means there are about 16,000 of those lights,
both vertically and horizontally,
that translate the pixels captured from the camera
into an image.
To compare your iPhone screen
only has about 2,500 by a 1,000 pixels.
- You need a lot of pixels, a lot of detail everywhere
because an audience member might be
looking in this direction,
another one might be looking in this direction.
So everywhere on the screen
is an important part of the screen.
- [Narrator] And that's not the only thing
that makes sphere so immersive.
These holes in the panel allow for sound to pass through
since the speakers are behind the screen
and different sounds can emit
from different parts of the screen at the same time.
(elephant roaring)
The $2.3 billion venue also has physical effects
like changing temperatures, breezes and scents,
as well as 10,000 seats that vibrate
to respond to scenes in the movie.
But the screen is the centerpiece
and to create a movie with a huge high definition camera
for a huge high definition theater,
Aronofsky and his team had to think carefully
about what they were shooting.
- You can't really hide behind anything
when you're shooting with big sky
'cause everything is sharp and if there's any mistakes,
they're just there.
- [Narrator] This shot of a climber on the Alps for example,
took some trial and error.
- You're looking over Dwayne the climber
and you're seeing this kind of valley below
and without seeing the depth of the mountains behind,
you kind of lost the environment.
It didn't feel as risky.
- [Narrator] Andrew Shulkind is the director of photography
for Sphere and worked with Aronofsky on "Postcard."
- It felt riskier and more special
that he was on this kind of spire
in front of this snowy landscape.
- [Narrator] That footage eventually made its way
to the screen in The Sphere.
- I remember we were in the edit when I saw that
and got super excited, but we couldn't tell what it was
because it was just in 4K and then we had to go through
the process of uprising it
to be able to see it in Big Dome.
- [Narrator] Sphere is still perfecting
some elements of the camera,
like improving its ability to shoot very tiny objects
and making it easier to use.
But the next big step is getting it
onto the International Space Station.
- The screen is so big that the ISS
can actually fit inside the screen
and so we can convey to people an experience
of doing a spacewalk that actually is realistic.
- One of the things that we're very interested in
as Sphere is to use the venue
and the technology for science
and so that's the type of things
that we're sort of curious about
and we'll potentially explore in the future.
(gentle music)