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Some mind-blowing technical details about the camera and recording system itself are in a secondary article linked from this one as well: https://petapixel.com

Some mind-blowing technical details about the camera and recording system itself are in a secondary article linked from this one as well: https://petapixel.com/2023/06/12/sphere-studios-big-sky-cinema-camera-features-an-insane-18k-sensor/ https://petapixel.com/2023/06/12/sphere-studios-big-sky-cine... Bits like a fiber-to-media recording system and custom GPU-based processing systems, really awesome project

nunez 3y ago
0.5Tbps light to chip!!!!! That's insane.
mschuster91 3y ago
> What’s even more impressive is the camera can run completely separate from this recording technology as long as it is connected through its cable system, this includes distances of up to a reported mile away. That's not that impressive, Blackmagic cameras have been able to run on fiber since 2018 [1]. The bandwidth for the Sphere cam however, that is insane. 500 Gbit/sec, that used to be the domain of entire ISP's core switches, and now that kind of performance is (effectively) handheld-capable. [1] https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/media/release/20180201-02 https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/media/release/20180201-02
- jandrese 3y ago
  A consumer grade GeForce 4070 has that much memory bandwidth, and there are more expensive models with even more. It’s an almost unfathomable number but at the same time it is well within the realm of commodity hardware. We are living in the future.
  - tgaj 3y ago
    Memory bandwidth is easier to achieve because of q short distance between elements on the motherboard.
- mhandley 3y ago
  > 500 Gbit/sec, that used to be the domain of entire ISP's core switches And then you realize that the latest datacenter Ethernet switch chips have 51 Tbit/sec agregate non-blocking capacity (128 ports of 400Gb/s, or similar setups), and a single AI cluster can use hundreds of these switches.
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
For those also curious as I was, some numbers: 4k is ~8 megapixels. 8k is ~35MP. 12k is ~80MP. 18k is ~170MP. Except for Big Sky the resolution is not 2:1 aspect ratio like DCI or other formats, it's 1:1 18k, so that's 340MP. Big Sky is shooting 120FPS at 10-bit (or 60FPS at 12 bit). That's 408Gbps/51GBps. A RX 7700 XT has 432Gbps memory bandwidth and a 4070 504Gbps... maybe that could render this? Unless you need to both write to memory and then read from it to render, and now you are up to a flagship RX7900 XTX or 4090 (960/1008Gbps). Which with their 24GB memory can fit a whopping 0.47s of video in memory. Now consider the NVMe storage array you ll need to get video at 408Gbps. PCIe 5.0 NVMe drives can supposedly hit 14GBps, so "only" 4 drives going full tilt should be adequate to let you play this back at realtime speeds.
- otteromkram 3y ago
  Ones might wager that they aren't going to use consumer-grade GPUs for this. Here's a pro-level card, for instance: https://www.amd.com/en/products/professional-graphics/amd-radeon-pro-w7900 https://www.amd.com/en/products/professional-graphics/amd-ra... That says 864 GB/s, which is pretty good.
  - jauntywundrkind 3y ago
    My bad, I failed to read the correct units!! The throughput figures in the desktop cards was actually in GB/s, not Gbps!!! So any of these would be more than fine. That makes a lot more sense, considering what it takes to make a complex 3d scene.

nunez 3y ago

0.5Tbps light to chip!!!!! That's insane.

mschuster91 3y ago

> What’s even more impressive is the camera can run completely separate from this recording technology as long as it is connected through its cable system, this includes distances of up to a reported mile away. That's not that impressive, Blackmagic cameras have been able to run on fiber since 2018 [1]. The bandwidth for the Sphere cam however, that is insane. 500 Gbit/sec, that used to be the domain of entire ISP's core switches, and now that kind of performance is (effectively) handheld-capable. [1] https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/media/release/20180201-02 https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/media/release/20180201-02

jandrese 3y ago
A consumer grade GeForce 4070 has that much memory bandwidth, and there are more expensive models with even more. It’s an almost unfathomable number but at the same time it is well within the realm of commodity hardware. We are living in the future.
- tgaj 3y ago
  Memory bandwidth is easier to achieve because of q short distance between elements on the motherboard.
mhandley 3y ago
> 500 Gbit/sec, that used to be the domain of entire ISP's core switches And then you realize that the latest datacenter Ethernet switch chips have 51 Tbit/sec agregate non-blocking capacity (128 ports of 400Gb/s, or similar setups), and a single AI cluster can use hundreds of these switches.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

For those also curious as I was, some numbers: 4k is ~8 megapixels. 8k is ~35MP. 12k is ~80MP. 18k is ~170MP. Except for Big Sky the resolution is not 2:1 aspect ratio like DCI or other formats, it's 1:1 18k, so that's 340MP. Big Sky is shooting 120FPS at 10-bit (or 60FPS at 12 bit). That's 408Gbps/51GBps. A RX 7700 XT has 432Gbps memory bandwidth and a 4070 504Gbps... maybe that could render this? Unless you need to both write to memory and then read from it to render, and now you are up to a flagship RX7900 XTX or 4090 (960/1008Gbps). Which with their 24GB memory can fit a whopping 0.47s of video in memory. Now consider the NVMe storage array you ll need to get video at 408Gbps. PCIe 5.0 NVMe drives can supposedly hit 14GBps, so "only" 4 drives going full tilt should be adequate to let you play this back at realtime speeds.

otteromkram 3y ago
Ones might wager that they aren't going to use consumer-grade GPUs for this. Here's a pro-level card, for instance: https://www.amd.com/en/products/professional-graphics/amd-radeon-pro-w7900 https://www.amd.com/en/products/professional-graphics/amd-ra... That says 864 GB/s, which is pretty good.
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  My bad, I failed to read the correct units!! The throughput figures in the desktop cards was actually in GB/s, not Gbps!!! So any of these would be more than fine. That makes a lot more sense, considering what it takes to make a complex 3d scene.