Immersive Video for Apple Vision Pro with Blackmagic Design URSA Cine Immersive & DaVinci Resolve 20 – Interview

by Reuben EvansApril 9^th, 2025

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During NAB 2025, we stopped at the Blackmagic Design booth to learn more about the URSA Cine Immersive camera, a unique offering that delivers a leap forward for spatial video shooting. It was specifically designed to shoot films made to be viewed on Apple’s Vision Pro headset. Also, Apple has just released the Apple Immersive Video Utility, which lets you import and manage films shot for the Apple Vision Pro.

Blackmagic Design made some very interesting announcements at this year’s NAB, including the PYXIS 12K camera and matching accessories. The Blackmagic Design URSA Cine Immersive Camera was announced in June 2024 and has been available for preorder since December 2024; however, it hasn’t started shipping yet. We stopped by Blackmagic Design to talk with Matthew DeJohn about the company’s progress on the camera and software development.

Blackmagic Design URSA Cine Immersive – features

The URSA Cine Immersive looks like nothing else on the market. Indeed, this camera combines two 12K image sensors to provide the high-resolution imagery needed for Apple’s Vision Pro. While it remains to be seen if “immersive video” will catch on meaningfully, it is always good to see manufacturers working together to bring new experiences to audiences, and we know that there has been demand for that as it has been quite complicated to shoot for the device up until now. Please check out our special podcast episode of Focus Check on the challenges of shooting immersive video for the Vision Pro.

However, the dual-fixed lens design “upscales” a classic approach to stereoscopic imagery: two lenses of fixed distance and a fixed focus depth. The URSA Cine Immersive captures data inside and outside of the viewer’s field of view, allowing viewers to look around within the captured video, for a viewing angle of over 180 degrees. Each 12K sensor uses an 8K image circle.

This helps explain why Apple’s Vision Pro has such demanding capture requirements. Indeed, the Apple Vision Pro requires 8K resolution to be captured per eye. The footage must be recorded at 90fps, and the codec must be camera raw (BRAW in this case). Together, all of these requirements should produce the effect of “being there” for the audience member.

Apple and Blackmagic Design collaborated on the product and the post-workflow to ensure seamless integration with the Vision Pro headset. Of course, all of that data needs to be stored somewhere. Blackmagic Design includes an 8TB media module, which holds about 90 minutes of footage. Media modules are available in 8TB and 16TB capacities.

Monitoring on the URSA Cine Immersive

The touchscreen on the camera allows you to monitor your shot. It overlays the captured image with a custom frame guide. You can see the 180-degree field of view that the camera captures. The Apple Vision Pro’s field of view is inside that. You can toggle to switch between the left and right eye or tap to punch in.

Currently, you cannot live monitor the camera’s signal using Vision Pro, as the firmware is still in beta. However, they are optimistic that there will be a way to stream directly to a Vision Pro from the camera in the future. If you want to monitor your image externally, you can send an SDI signal out from the camera into DaVinci Resolve for live monitoring.

DaVinci Resolve integration

Blackmagic has also been hard at work on the post-production side. DaVinci Resolve has a new workflow named “Apple ProIM.” This makes the timeline into a stereoscopic timeline. You’ll see tools for tweaking each “eye” and export settings to export movies for the Vision Pro.

The Apple ProIM workflow is distinct from other stereoscopic workflows because it passes Vision Pro-specific metadata from capture through post and into the device itself. The key portion of this metadata is the lens calibration information that gets preserved in the BRAW file. This explains why Apple had to work so closely with Blackmagic to get the whole immersive pipeline working correctly.

Apple Vision Pro integration

Apple just released a free app called the Apple Immersive Video Utility that allows users to “import, organize, package, and review Apple Immersive video media on their Mac.

Pricing and availability

The Blackmagic Design URSA Cine Immersive is now available to pre-order. It was originally priced at $29,995, but prices may be higher in the US due to the new tariffs.

For more information, please visit Blackmagic Design’s website here.

What do you think of the URSA Cine Immersive? Would you be interested in getting one and shooting unique content with it? What kinds of stories would you want to tell? Let us know in the comments below!