MSG Ventures (part of Madison Square Garden Entertainment) create and develop all the technical innovations we’ll be able to experience at the MSG Sphere in Las Vegas at their 68,00 square foot facility in Burbank.
Innovations includes the beam-forming Sphere Immersive Sound system they have made with Holoplot to combat the dome’s inherent acoustics using a technique called Wave Field Synthesis. The system’s precision allows sounds to be targeted at individuals wherever they are in the audience, down to the level of an intimate whisper.
In Burbank, they do all of this R&D inside a quarter-scale model of the Las Vegas sphere they call Big Dome. Here they conduct tests using content captured by a range of cameras formed into arrays as well as the company’s own Big Sky camera (above). It has a 316-megapixel 3” x 3” HDR sensor that captures an 18K square image, forty times the resolution of 4K, 160 times the resolution of HD.
Big Sky’s media recorder takes in full resolution, 60 fps, uncompressed RAW footage at 30 Gigabytes / second, or 120 fps at 50 Gigabytes / second to its custom 32 terabyte media magazines. It can handle 600 Gigabits / second of network traffic. SphereLab’s proprietary image processing software uses GPU-accelerated RAW processing to make the workflow of capturing and delivering content to the Sphere’s ultra-high resolution screen practical and efficient.
Source: CNET and Y.M. Cinema