More details about the new Spatial & Immersive cameras from Canon and Blackmagic

Canon

Added to the Canon RF-S7.8mm F4 STM dual lens introduced on the WWDC24 presentation, Canon is going all-or-nothing for stereoscopic content creation, and now they present another stereoscopic lens for the R7.

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The new Canon RF-S3.9mm F3.5 STM dual fisheye lens will be compatible with the EOS R7 bodies and together they will form part of the company’s roadmap for Virtual Reality content capture.

This new dual fisheye lens will have a 144-degree angled view and will use equidistant projection in order to create virtual reality content. The lens also features single-shot autofocus, left/right focus adjustment, air sphere coating (ASC) to minimize ghosting, and support for additional filters.

To support all the work that has to be done by the lens and camera, Canon already has its EOS VR Utility software ready with a subscription service that will make it much easier for VR content creators.

Note: the firsts seconds of the video has inverted eyes, other dual images on the video have the correct left-eye-first disposition for watching in 3D displays.

Blackmagic

The Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive system is still in development. It is designed to be a full end-to-end workflow with DaVinci Resolve to produce cinematic Apple Immersive Video on Vision Pro. Working together with Apple, Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive and DaVinci Resolve will give filmmakers the workflow to be able to shoot, edit and deliver Apple Immersive Video.

Based on the new Blackmagic URSA Cine platform, the new Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive model features a fixed, custom lens system with a sensor that is said to produce 8160 x 7200 resolution per eye with pixel level synchronization. It will have extremely wide dynamic range and shoot at 90 fps stereoscopic into a Blackmagic RAW Immersive file.

The new Blackmagic RAW Immersive file format is an enhanced version of Blackmagic RAW that’s been designed to make immersive video simple to use through the post production workflow.

The Blackmagic URSA Cine also features a custom lens system designed specifically for Blackmagic URSA Cine’s large format image sensors with extremely accurate positional data which is calibrated at the time of manufacturing. Plus, the immersive lens data is mapped, calibrated, and stored per eye into the Blackmagic RAW file, so it travels through the post production process in the Blackmagic RAW Immersive file itself. That eliminates the need for multiple files to capture an immersive scene and will all be handled in updates to DaVinci Resolve.

An immersive video viewer which will let editors pan, tilt, and roll clips for viewing on 2d monitors and allow clips to be adjusted and monitored on Apple Vision Pro headsets. Transitions rendered by Vision Pro will also be able to be bypassed using XML metadata, giving editors clean master files where the transitions are rendered in the Vision Pro. Export presets will enable output into a package, which can be viewed directly on Apple Vision Pro.