Inside the Cirrus Apple Immersive Film: Shooting 180° Stereo From a Plane – Focus Check ep131

by Felix TappeinerAugust 27^th, 2026

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Anthony Bottini has watched people take a Vision Pro headset off in tears. Cirrus Aircraft spent five days over the Arizona desert with three Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive cameras, came home with 25 to 30 terabytes for two hours of footage, and turned it into an Apple Immersive Video that its global sales team now carries to events in a flight case. In this special episode, we ask the obvious question: can a film you can only watch in a headset actually sell aircraft?

This week’s Focus Check episode is not a news episode; the format this week is one conversation from start to finish rather than the usual chapter-by-chapter news run. Nino’s guests are Anthony Bottini, Director of Media at Cirrus Aircraft, and John “JR” Racine, Creative and Technical Director at Rogue Labs, who has been working in immersive since the NextVR days and spent time at Apple on Apple Immersive Video. Between them, we work through the internal business case for buying Vision Pros for a global sales team, five weather-tortured days shooting out of Page, Arizona, with the Top Gun: Maverick aerial team, air-to-air flying tight enough to catch prop wash, the stereo limits of a light aircraft cockpit, the lens-borrowing trick that buys back the wingtip, a 25–30TB post pipeline that still went from shoot to demo in six weeks, why a good spatial audio edit is half the experience – and whether any of it moves airplanes off the ramp.

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Why Cirrus built an Apple Vision Pro app “Let’s Go Fly!“

(01:06 in the episode)

Anthony Bottini runs the studio at the Cirrus Vision Center in Knoxville, Tennessee. He had never seen an immersive film before someone put a headset on him, and the reaction was immediate: “I couldn’t believe how real that experience was.” The question that followed was a commercial one – if an aerial flight over Maine or Hawaii could move him that much, could the same medium put a prospective customer in the left seat of an SR22 without an actual demo flight?

His own benchmark is deliberately unscientific. “When I’m done with that film, I feel like it’s sixty or seventy percent of the real thing.” For a product where the buying decision is emotional as often as it is rational, that number was enough to start a project.

Selling immersive internally: Vision Pros for the global sales team

(03:40 in the episode)

The hard part was not the shoot; it was the pitch. Bottini could not simply screenshare an immersive film in a boardroom – the only way to demonstrate it was to put a headset on one executive at a time and let them watch his favourite film in there. “Once I won enough hearts and minds, it became worth taking a risk on.”

Crucially, the business case never rested on passive downloads from Vision Pro owners worldwide. Cirrus committed the money to buy headsets for its global sales team, which is where the value actually sits: the app is a sales tool the company controls, not a piece of content it hopes people find.

Five days in the desert: Cirrus, Rogue Labs, Blackmagic, and XBrand

(06:10 in the episode)

Four days of flying, technically five, based out of Page, Arizona. Cirrus produced, Rogue Labs shot, Blackmagic Design supported the camera side, and XBrand – the aerial team behind Top Gun: Maverick – brought its Piper Aerostar with nose and tail pods, with Kevin LaRosa as aerial coordinator and camera ship pilot, and Michael FitzMaurice as aerial DP.

Weather was, in Bottini’s words, torture: winter in the desert, with the first day spent waiting on the ground, hoping the later days would cut together in continuity. The forced weather day turned out to be the luckiest break of the shoot – it dusted the whole area in snow, and JR reckons the Grand Canyon shots are “ten times better” for it. The team had storyboarded from an earlier aerial scout with Cirrus and XBrand, so the maneuvers were planned, but each flight still left room to chase a ridge or a sunset.

Air-to-air with a fixed 180° lens

(09:11 in the episode)

There is no zoom on an immersive camera and no way to reframe in post, so the only lens you have is proximity. That made the air-to-air work tighter than either team would normally fly. Close formation also means turbulence: the overtaking aircraft flies through the camera ship’s prop wash and wake on the way under, something that has to be briefed rather than discovered.

On the rigging side, Rogue Labs came in with an advantage – a lot of its immersive work is shot from Robinson helicopters, so the vibration problem was already solved mechanically. Nothing in the Cirrus piece was stabilised in post; it was all handled in camera and in the mounts. And as Bottini points out, no drone would have kept pace with the airplane anyway.

Why the Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive made this possible

(12:11 in the episode)

Bottini is blunt: “If Blackmagic hadn’t come out with that camera, this project never would have happened.” Apple pioneered the format with bespoke beam-splitter rigs that were simply out of reach for a corporate studio. A single body that ships ready to shoot changed the calculation – Blackmagic also helped with testing, worked through how to mount the camera on a stabilised aerial platform, and lent additional bodies, with three URSA Cine Immersives in use by the end of the shoot.

The workflow benefit is just as large as the hardware one. Each take arrives as one Blackmagic RAW file containing both eyes with the per-camera lens calibration data baked in, so there is no syncing, no horizon alignment between eyes and no focus matching. DaVinci Resolve recognises it as stereoscopic BRAW, can stream directly to the Vision Pro for shot checks, and exports a lightweight Apple Immersive Video render for sharing. Focus, incidentally, is fixed from the factory – roughly a metre to infinity.

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

The cockpit problem, lens borrowing and directing the gaze

(13:17 in the episode)

JR’s view is that the camera has no real limitations – the medium does. In a confined space, anything too close to the lens breaks the natural stereo effect, the same way your own eyes struggle to look down at your hand without moving your head. Extensive testing in the SR22 Turbo before Arizona is what made him comfortable that the cockpit would hold up.

The framing compromise was seeing enough of Justin, the flight instructor, while still seeing the wingtip – and in an airplane, not seeing the wingtip makes people feel closed in. Rogue Labs bought back roughly five to ten degrees of usable field of view with a technique JR calls lens borrowing: because each lens sees the other in frame, they used imagery from the left eye to paint the left lens out of the right eye, shrinking the black cutouts you normally see when you look sideways in immersive footage. They also physically turned the camera to force the viewer to look out of the window – in hindsight, JR says, he would turn it further still. Attention is steered with dips to black and, more than anything, with sound.

16K, 25–30TB, and a six-week turnaround

(21:05 in the episode)

Two hours of 16K stereo footage came to roughly 25 to 30 terabytes. Bottini’s advice on that is unglamorous and correct: if you are not used to that volume of data, you need an infrastructure plan before you need a creative one. Offline and online were both done in DaVinci Resolve Studio on a Mac Studio M3 Ultra, with foveation moving data toward the centre of the frame where the viewer is actually looking and dropping it off at the edges.

The timeline is the part worth noting. Shot in the first week of December, running in a custom app and demoed at a Cirrus customer event in mid-January. The old immersive headaches – syncing left and right eye, aligning horizons between them – are simply gone.

“A good spatial edit is 50% of the experience”

(23:32 in the episode)

Both guests are emphatic about audio. Apple’s spatial format lets you place a sound anywhere in the 360° sphere around the viewer, which turns audio into blocking. The film’s opening shot has the SR22 coming up from beneath the camera; JR describes demoing it at NAB with the spatial track muted and watching people search the sky with no idea where the airplane was. With the spatial mix, the sound from below and behind tells them where to look before the aircraft arrives.

The material came from onboard four-channel ambisonics recorded on every shoot day, plus Foley – Cirrus took an SR out at Knoxville to capture pass-bys, which is what you hear under the low flyby. The mix was done by spatial audio mixer Oliver Cadell of 1618 Digital in the UK.

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

Does it actually sell airplanes?

(26:52 in the episode)

Downloads are the wrong metric when the installed base is this small, and Cirrus knows it. The tool went live internally in February and public at the beginning of June, and the company tracks public downloads as an interesting number while treating sales-team conversions as the real one. Regional Cirrus events now include a Vision Pro station staffed by two or three salespeople – at an event with a hundred guests you cannot fly everyone, so the headset becomes the demo flight. Bottini says the signals are anecdotal but already point to a direct line from a Vision Pro session to an aircraft sale. Cirrus has taken the demo to South by Southwest in Austin alongside a travelling mock-up of the same airplane: fly it in the headset, then walk over and sit in it.

The emotional response is the part that surprised everyone. “I’ve seen people cry as they watch this film,” Bottini says – often people who have wanted to fly their whole lives and never got around to it. Alongside the film, the app carries 100% scale 3D models built from the engineering CAD data by the in-house 3D team in Duluth, Minnesota and Knoxville, simplified enough for the Vision Pro to handle without visible polygon breakage. Anchor one to your living room floor and you can walk through it – Bottini’s tip is to go and sit in the back seat.

One-off, or the start of an immersive programme?

(32:13 in the episode)

“That is the million dollar question.” Cirrus is watching sales-team reports week by week. A Vision Jet film is already close to a given – bigger cabin, faster, higher, more to work with – and if the numbers hold, Bottini has a wish list: the Pacific Northwest out of Puget Sound, circuits around Mount Rainier, the south of France and its coastal airfields. The strategic point underneath it is that Cirrus wants to grow personal aviation generally, which is why the app is free in the Vision Pro store even though it was funded as a sales tool. As Bottini puts it, if a kid puts on a headset, watches the film and decides to become a pilot, that is the other half of the win.

What did you make of this format change – more long-form interviews between the news episodes, or do you want us to keep Focus Check strictly weekly news? Let us know in the comments below or on YouTube, or write to us at [email protected]. And if you haven’t yet, subscribe to Focus Check on your favourite platform so you don’t miss an episode.