Inside “Debut at the BBC Proms”: Director Ian Russell on Filming Classical Music for Apple Vision Pro

by Nino LeitnerJune 22^nd, 2026

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A working classical music director on five Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive cameras, one meter of clearance from every instrument, and half an hour to render thirty seconds of footage. Debut at the BBC Proms is one of the first classical concerts ever produced for Apple Vision Pro, the longest Apple Immersive title to date, and according to its own director, a project that made him feel like a fish out of water. We spoke to Ian Russell about what he had to unlearn.

When Apple Immersive Video released Debut at the BBC Proms in March this year, it arrived as one of the first classical music concerts ever produced for Apple Immersive, and at roughly 35 minutes, the longest Apple Immersive title to date. The piece captures pianist Lukas Sternath making his BBC Proms debut on 7 September 2025 at the Royal Albert Hall, performing Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Sakari Oramo. It was produced by Livewire Pictures for BBC Arts, shot on five Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive cameras, and posted in DaVinci Resolve Studio.

We spoke to director Ian Russell, who has overseen the television direction of the BBC Proms for Livewire since 2022 and worked on Proms broadcasts for decades before that. Debut at the BBC Proms was his first stereoscopic 3D production, and he was candid about how much of his concert-television vocabulary he had to set aside.

Five cameras, half a terabyte per minute

The first thing worth establishing is that Debut at the BBC Proms was not a parallel feed cut from the standard BBC TV broadcast. “This was a completely separate recording,” Russell told us. “There was obviously an audio recording made, but the only video recording made of Lukas’s concert was the Apple Immersive recording.”

Five URSA Cine Immersive bodies covered the Grieg concerto. Each camera carries two 8K sensors, producing what Russell describes as “16K” of paired stereoscopic data per body. “The piano concerto we were recording was half an hour long. By the time you’ve rigged the cameras and started them into record and finish, that was well over a half-hour recording. Times that by five, it was an awful lot of data to manage and process.”

The data weight is one half of the disorientation. The other is creative. “In some ways, this was like going back to when I first started directing television programs. It was like learning something from scratch again. I felt like a fish out of water. I felt like I had to throw away a lot of what I knew, a lot of the normal processes and practices that we would use, and be prepared to start again from scratch.”

The one-meter rule

Russell’s most concrete lesson from the prep period was about distance. Apple loaned the production a Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive several weeks ahead of the shoot, and the team used other Proms in the season as opportunities to test.

“We found that if you put the camera too close to an object, so if you put it too close to the piano, when you viewed that content on the immersive device, you almost felt really uncomfortable. It felt like your legs had gone through the side of the piano in a way that would be physically impossible. There was a rule of thumb that Apple suggested, which was that we kept the camera at least a meter away from any object.”

This is partly perceptual comfort and partly stereoscopic eye strain. “The 3D effects of having objects that are really very close to you, there’s a limit to how much that can work as well.” On a 70-to-80-piece orchestra, finding a meter of clearance around each camera position is non-trivial. “It was really invaluable to work with the Apple team, who of course have the most experience of this immersive technology anywhere in the world.”

Wide-angle and standard at the same time

The URSA Cine Immersive’s lens is fixed. There is no zoom, no focal-length variation, and the only way to change framing is to physically move the camera. That collapses much of the conventional concert-TV decision-making about lens choice, but it introduces a new compositional problem.

“Because these cameras have a 180-degree field of view, there’s no such thing as a close shot. It’s effectively an ultra wide-angle lens that you’re framing. And I think we all know that framing wide-angle shots, it’s harder, it’s more critical to get that right.”

But the Vision Pro doesn’t show the viewer the entire 180 degrees at once. “Because the device directs the field of view in, it’s almost like shooting with a sort of standard mid-range lens, like a 50mm lens, because that’s the field of view you’re sort of looking at, maybe a 35mil, 50mil equivalent full-frame. So every single camera placement, very quickly apparent, had to be considered as both a wide-angle camera and a sort of more standard lens camera. To get a shot that worked for both was the challenge.”

Some traditional Proms positions did translate. The classic shot looking down the keyboard from a small remote camera, conventionally a tight on the hands and fingers, “we found that you can do that,” Russell said, although the framing now reads completely differently inside the Vision Pro.

Why the cameras don’t move

The most contested editorial choice in the released piece is the lack of camera movement. UploadVR’s review of the title was specific in its criticism that the cuts compete with the music. As a viewer, the natural impulse is to want to drift closer, particularly during the lyrical second-movement passages. We asked Russell whether he ever considered slow camera moves on a slider, perhaps a half-circle on an automated rig.

“I think the experience we gained on doing this, I would be more in favor of movement,” he said. The reason it didn’t happen on this production was a combination of Apple guidance and Royal Albert Hall logistics. “We had conversations with Apple, and we looked at some of the previous immersive work that was available. Apple’s advice to us, from their experience, was if in doubt, just don’t move the cameras, because different viewers react to the experience differently. Some people can’t stand that sense of movement of a camera because they know they’re sat with the device on, they’re sat in a fixed position, and their senses are telling them they’re moving. That conflict can confuse the brain and almost give a sense of, if it’s too extreme, a sense of almost travel sickness.”

The Proms schedule compounded the problem. “There’s a massive practicality that filming a Prom, however you film it, you have to contend with. That Prom is live on radio. That Prom is there for the audience in the hall. And it will happen when it’s scheduled to happen. Nothing really, barring extraordinary circumstances, nothing delays a Prom. So there was a very limited time by which we had to rig the cameras in position on stage, and a very limited time to de-rig them afterwards because the piano had to be moved.”

There was a further unknown. “Until that orchestra turns up on the day, that morning, until they set the stage, that might change. It’s always possible that a conductor or an orchestra will change their layout. The piano will almost certainly be in much the same place, but the orchestra around it might change. We couldn’t finally decide where to put each of the cameras.”

Russell described one position he particularly wanted to nail: “I wanted to put a camera on the stage, fairly near, but a meter away from the bass end, the left-hand end of the piano keys, looking out into the hall, because you get that scale of the hall. I thought you could see Lukas performing to an audience for the first time. Although the hall’s quite dark, the attention should be on Lukas. You get a sense of place by doing that. But we didn’t know where the desks of the violins would be. We didn’t know exactly how we could place that camera until the orchestra was beginning to lay itself out.”

Spatial audio and Spiritland

The URSA Cine Immersive has no native ambisonic microphone. The spatial mix was handled separately. “We had Spiritland do the mix. Livewire employed a company with spatial experience to do that,” Russell said.

The Royal Albert Hall already carries a substantial mic infrastructure, much of it permanent for the Proms season. “There is a full mic rig. Some of the mics are permanently there for two months of the summer season to capture all 70-odd Proms that take place at the Albert Hall. Some of them are positioned specifically for each Prom depending on that orchestral layout. All the stems, all the individual mic tracks, were available for the spatial remix, and Spiritland negotiated some additional mics to capture the spatial aspects.”

Access was a challenge. “Some of the slung mics, the main stereo pairs, the sort of equivalent of a Decca tree that are slung above the audience, some of those mics it’s very difficult to get access to because the hall is so busy with orchestras, sometimes two orchestras coming in every day. There’s precious little time when you can clear the arena and put devices in, or lower the slings that allow you to adjust those things.”

On whether the audio image should follow the camera position when the picture cuts to a different vantage point, Russell drew a parallel with stereo’s early days. “We had these conversations when stereo sound first came in. We had the conversations: if you cut to in the audience facing the orchestra and then you cut to a reverse shot showing the conductor, should the stereo sound stage change around? I can remember experimenting with it then. Bizarrely, you lose a connection with the music because the stage switches. It’s too confusing, I think, to hear. So I’m sure the same applies.”

Half an hour to render thirty seconds

The post-production timeline ran roughly six months from the September shoot to the March release. Russell attributes the duration partly to learning curve, partly to render times that put modern editing back into a slower era.

“It was like going back to the very beginnings of non-linear editing. If you wanted to try something on a three-minute clip of the piece, it might take two or three hours to render that clip. You very quickly learn that you had to try these things in sort of 30-second bites, and even that would take half an hour to render sometimes. If it didn’t work and you wanted to adjust something slightly, it was another half an hour before you could find out the results. That very slow incremental step of adjusting things was a flashback to those early days of nonlinear.”

Light levels at the hall could not be tuned for the cameras. “The orchestra has to play at a certain level. You can’t just light it for filming. So it had to be workable for them and suitable for the audience in the hall. Deciding what gain level to set the cameras at, and then in post there was a denoise process that inevitably probably would have happened at whatever level. All these trade-offs were discussed beforehand. It was just a fascinating process to be in what felt like the very beginnings of a new sort of film technology.”

The viewer has the agency

Russell raised an interesting framing for what immersive does to direction itself. “Someone from Apple said immersive productions give the viewer the agency, because you can have the same shot, you can watch the same thing half a dozen times, and every time you come to that shot you can look at a different bit of it. You have the agency to do that as the viewer. But in traditional film, it’s the director who is directing the attention of the audience to a particular thing, to a close-up, to a wide shot. Those sort of techniques disappear largely when you’re doing immersive coverage.”

His own most exciting use case for the format isn’t classical concerts, it’s sport. “How many football matches must I have watched in my life? I can get quite excited watching a conventional HD football match, 4K football match. But the behind-the-goal shots shot with an immersive camera, where you can actually see the dimensionality of it all, and you can see the skill level of the players to avoid the tackle or to make the tackle and then go on and score the goal, suddenly it means so much more. I would think there would be a market at some point, when the technology catches up, streaming these really high quality feeds so the acuity of the experience is comparable to that of real-life naked-eye.”

He also suggested, somewhat obliquely, that the demonstration problem is real. “The first Apple Vision Pro that we had in the office, people were queuing to have a go. I can remember there was a shot when a basketball hit the lens of the camera. You knew when you got to that point because the person sat in their chair with the Vision Pro on would go and recoil from the basketball, because it’s so realistic.”

Doing it again

Asked whether Debut at the BBC Proms (Vision Pro Apple TV link) was a one-off, Russell was direct. “I’d love another go. Why would you want to stop there? All of us in the job that we do, if we’re creative, I don’t think we ever walk away from a job entirely happy with what we’ve done. We might be broadly happy, but there’s always something we want to do better, always something we want to try differently.”

The BBC has not announced a 2026 immersive Proms follow-up to this initial pilot. But the technical pipeline that didn’t exist when Russell rigged five URSA Cine Immersive bodies on the Royal Albert Hall stage last September is moving fast. At NAB 2026 in April, Blackmagic Design announced the URSA Cine Immersive 100G with a 100Gb/s SMPTE 2110 IP output and a companion live encoder, already deployed on the Spectrum Front Row Lakers Apple Immersive games. Live immersive concert streaming is no longer a thought experiment.

Debut at the BBC Proms is free to watch on Apple Vision Pro through the Apple TV app.

Have you watched Debut at the BBC Proms on Apple Vision Pro? Would you take on a 180-degree stereoscopic shoot at this point in the format’s evolution? Let us know in the comments.

Featured image credit: Apple / BBC / CineD, composition by CineD