American Cinematographer - November 2023 - 38

SPHERE AND THE BIG SKY CAMERA
The " Big Dome " Sphere facility in Burbank, Calif., is a quarterscale,
full-resolution prototype of the Las Vegas venue where
content is developed and tested.
The image on the screen is 16K (16,384x16,384) driven by 25 synchronized
4K video servers.
Custom Camera
Sphere's head of capture, cinematographer Andrew Shulkind, brought
his extensive experience in alternative technologies - including virtual
and augmented reality - to bear on the Sphere project. He notes that
the endeavor " starts and ends " with Sphere Entertainment Co. executive
chairman and CEO James Dolan's vision of a " transformative experience "
for audiences.
In assessing the venue's ambitions and extensive camera testing,
Shulkind redirected earlier efforts - which focused on multi-cam arrays,
such as an 11-camera Red Monstro 8K array, a nine-camera timelapse
array and a nodal motion-control system - to a new custom
single-camera, single-sensor concept that would become known as " Big
Sky. "
Shulkind became involved with the project as a consultant, initially to
help refine the technology and make it production-friendly. " We needed
to make sure we weren't building tools that we couldn't use, " he says.
" We had to be able to put the camera on a helicopter, on the end of a
telescopic crane, or follow a race car on a track at 100 miles per hour. We
needed to make sure that the tech wouldn't limit the imaginations of the
artists who wanted to use it.
" Shooting with arrays, which are commonly used for VFX plates and
ride films, are too arduous to use as a primary system for Sphere, " Shulkind
continues. " They're too heavy to ship, too tough to rig, costly to stitch
[the image in post], and they forced us to compromise too much on
shooting in close proximity. We knew we needed a single-camera solution,
but there was nothing in the market even close to what we needed. "
The only solution was to build the highest-resolution digital-cinema
camera system ever created.
Building Big Sky
Enter Deanan DaSilva, a former CTO of Red Digital Cinema, whom Shulkind
had known from earlier partnerships and had initially brought into
the Sphere project to help innovate and solve myriad technical issues.
After querying multiple camera manufacturers who were not interested
in making such a custom product, DaSilva set about designing his own
solution. The resulting Big Sky camera features an 18K sensor that measures
77.5mm x 75.6mm (3.05 " x2.98 " ); the system is capable of capturing
images at 120 fps and transferring data at 60 gigabytes per second.
(See " Custom Workflow, " page 40.)
" I knew the sensor design came first, " says DaSilva. " Once we started
the design, we realized that not only had no one ever built a sensor of
this size for high speed, but no one had ever packaged one before. Honestly,
we didn't anticipate that issue, but due to the size and the heat,
nothing traditional or pre-made would work. Everything had to be custom-created.
We had to dive deep into the silicon packaging technology,
how to dice it all up, wire bond off the sensor and hold it in place with
ceramics and metals that were thermally matched. Once we had that
functioning, we had to build the camera architecture around it - which,
38 / NOVEMBER 2023
American Cinematographer - November 2023

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