Abu Dhabi SeaWorld is a Monster
Terry Brown, a VP with MacGillivray Freeman Films posted a long article on Linkedin to highlight a huge project to create 114 minutes of immersive 360º video for SeaWorld Abu Dhabi’s massive LED screen. In case his full 21 pages is TL:DR for you, we have captured some highlights of his nearly four year project here.
The screen used was an LED that is 718′ (219m) round and 50′ (15m) high, situated around 17′ (5m) off the floor. The resolution of the images created was around 25K horizontally, although the display was around 40K! The display was designed by Holovis which covered much of the AV at the installation. There’s a video here of the hub.
After discussion with the client, the frame rate chosen was 30fps and the first tests were conducted using 10 4K cameras linked together and carried by a large drone, although the weight was a challenge!
A New Rig for the Project
A specialist was used for the project to build a unique waterproof and transportable rig for the many underwater shots. Putting together multiple cameras had to be modelled and Brown details his method in the article – it’s not as simple as you might think. Finally, the Z-Ca, E2C camera was chosen as it was expected to be usable in a master/slave mode where one camera could run a ‘chain’ of others. Nine cameras were used with 17mm lenses and 35% overlap between the images.
Brown has an interesting deep-dive into the challenges of using multiple cameras in this way. It was far from trivial and he needed to undertake proper analysis and testing. Unfortunately, the ‘chain’ system was not accurate enough so an audio equivalent of a ‘clapper board’ was used. Even so, syncing was a challenge.
As well as the main rig, the team developed a drone-based ‘topside’ rig with five RED Komodo cameras with 15mm lenses. This system had its own challenges.
Data: lots of Data
The two cameras produced a huge amount of data per day – potentially up to 34 Terabytes of data! Further, all the shots had to be managed to ensure they could be stitched together to a single piece of video from the 42 storage cards used! Brown describes how this was done in detail in the article.
Logistics were never going to be easy and the group had 17-20 cases of gear weighing up to 2,000lbs (900 kg) to transport around the world, including spares. Batteries were a huge challenge as they could not be put in checked baggage for safety reasons.
Water Cools Doesn’t it?
Brown details the testing in the Caribbean which highlighted a lot of issues. We were surprised to see that cooling was one. Typically ‘water cooling’ is a well-known technique, but when the sea temperature is in the ‘mid 80s’ (30 degrees C), that effect doesn’t work so well! That was compounded by the number of devices and batteries in a small space. The topside camera had its own challenges because of the extreme transitions in lighting between different spaces.
As the group was making some ‘traditional’ non-360 degree content as well, the group also used a RED single camera for some shots.
Post-Production Was Time Consuming
Returning from the Caribbean revealed how challenging and time consuming the post production process would be. 8K was used for the proxies! Three different editors worked on different parts of the project with locations in Sri Lanka as well as southern California. Work was done in a 360 degree VR environment which was challenging as the content was not 3D.
Camera motion that was fine in some circumstances could become very disorienting when viewed this way. The same was true in the 360 degree mode, as the content would be finally shown. Further, there was no real way of monitoring the fine details of such a huge resolution image (equivalent to six or so IMAX screens) when editing. A lot of work was needed to deal with, for example, anomalous small fish when the images were stitched. That was, perhaps, a case of ‘Finding Nemo’ and eliminating him!
To give a sense of the difficulty, the final finishing took a year and a half, over which time the workflow was refined but as the author says “the process was a tedious one”. The workflow is detailed in the full article (PP16 & 17).
Final Finishing
The final finishing was done on-site in Abu Dhabi as the installation and building work was completed. Color grading was made harder by the work lights in the building phase. The video was played out over four 7th Sense servers as ‘horizontal slices’ needed more than 4GB/s of playout speed (regular readers may remember that 7th Sense is the company behind the servers in The Sphere in Las Vegas and we interviewed them here). Grading and testing took a month and a half, not helped by government restrictions on internet data rates.
After this grading, finishing still took another year and a last trip back to Abu Dhabi to complete the final delivery of the content.
We are obliged to Glenn Estersohn of Estersohn Inc for drawing our attention to this article.
