Bob Moses Concert at Red Rocks Captured with URSA Cine 12K LF
PYXIS 12K and URSA Cine 12K LF enable cinematic concert imaging pipeline from sensor to broadcast.
Blackmagic Design today announced that electronic music duo Bob Moses’ recent concert at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, CO was live streamed to Twitch using an end to end Blackmagic Design production pipeline. Featuring seven Blackmagic PYXIS 12K digital film cameras and a Blackmagic URSA Cine 12K LF digital film camera, the production leveraged matching 12K sensors with 16 stops of dynamic range to deliver stunning image quality for a cinematic live production.
Produced by Denver based Butter Creations, the event was shot in 3:2 anamorphic open gate, which was the team’s main goal according to Butter Creations’ Founder and Director of Photography Tomas Morgan. Having used numerous Blackmagic Design products previously, Morgan noted that the URSA Cine 12K LF sensor was their top choice for the project. “The 3:2 open gate on the URSA Cine 12K and PYXIS 12K sensors was the unlock for this whole project,” he noted. “Shooting anamorphic on a sensor that gives you that much real estate meant we could deliver a true 2.25:1 image, without throwing away resolution, and still have headroom for reframing in post.”
He continued, “This was a great opportunity to demonstrate the capabilities of Blackmagic Design’s 12K sensor in a live music environment. The sensor design produced some of the cleanest footage with the most dynamic range we’ve had the pleasure of working with in recent memory, and the cameras gave us the flexibility to shoot in whatever aspect ratio, resolution and compression we wanted.”
Morgan noted that the show had six camera operators plus a drone, with Morgan and Engineer John Houston producing the show, and Alex Kolb directing. The cameras were paired with a combination of zoom and anamorphic lenses, with video run down fiber lines using Mini Converters Optical Fiber 12Gs on both ends. They were then fed into an ATEM 2 M/E Constellation 4K live production switcher, controlled by an ATEM 1 M/E Advanced Panel, in the control room that contained additional Blackmagic Design live production gear, including Blackmagic Micro Converters BiDirectional SDI/HDMI, an UltraStudio HD Mini capture and playback device for graphics, HyperDeck Studio HD Mini broadcast decks for line cut and ISO recordings, and a SmartView 12G monitor.
“The broadcast side of the flypack is just second nature at this point and works without question,” said Morgan. “The ATEM 2 M/E Constellation 4K paired with the ATEM Advanced Panel just stays out of our way and lets the director be creative in the moment instead of fighting with the switcher. The fiber ecosystem deserves a callout as well, because being able to run 12G over fiber with the Optical Fiber Converters meant we could put cameras wherever the show needed them without worrying about cable runs, which was especially helpful at a venue the size of Red Rocks.”
Butter Creations is also currently in post production on a full length concert film for the Bob Moses show, using DaVinci Resolve Studio editing, color grading, visual effects (VFX) and audio post production software. “We’re editing and color grading the concert film in DaVinci Resolve, and the performance is remarkable,” noted Morgan. “We’re using the built in multicamera switching feature, and we built macros to enable the number of cameras we needed as preset keyboard shortcuts. Even working with multiple 12K camera files in a multicam timeline, playback on our MacBook Pro M2 Max is shockingly smooth, allowing us to maintain a real time editing experience without relying on proxies or reducing resolution.”
He concluded, “We were really lucky with this project. Bob Moses and Twitch both gave us the creative freedom to simply make something awesome, and we didn’t get any pushback on our anamorphic dreams or the crew needed to make this all happen. I knew the Blackmagic Design ecosystem very well going into it, and as expected, the gear stayed out of our way during the creative process, which is the most I can personally ask for out of any piece of camera kit. We’ve never been let down by Blackmagic Design products.”
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