Breaking down MV-HEVC, Apple's New Spatial Video Format

A Happy Krampusnacht 👹

In today’s VP Land we’ve got:

🤓 Everything we know so far about Apple’s Spatial Video
🏀 Mixed reality and sports
🥄 Filmic’s entire team is laid off

Let’s jump into it!

STAGE A

What We Know So Far About Spatial Video

Apple’s Vision Pro is still months away from being released. But we’ve already gotten a teaser of how we can shoot and create videos for spatial viewing.

Spatial Videos on iPhone 15 Pro

The iPhone 15 Pro can now shoot spatial videos. The problem is there isn’t much you can do with them yet (though this person on Reddit got them to play on a Quest 3).

However, a handful of journalists were invited to an Apple press event to record spatial video and then watch it (and other clips) on a Vision Pro.

You can read their reactions here, but a common theme that stood out is how intimate and life-like the experience is.

Not to go too far off on a tangent, but this shares a huge overlap with reality scanning with NeRFs and Gaussian Splats and was another key benefit highlighted in the video we shared last week from Bilawal Sidhu. What are memories going to be like when we can scan a room and be back inside it 50 years from now?

Now as a medium for telling and shaping stories (aka content) - it was also announced that Final Cut Pro would support editing the new spatial video files.

But what what exactly are these files?

The HEVC Multiview(verse)

In an Apple Developer video, they break down what you need to take advantage of 3D video in visionOS. The delivery of 3D or stereoscopic videos is through an extension of HEVC called multiview HEVC, or MV-HEVC.

Each frame carries multiple views for left and right images. The same video file can still be played as 2D on regular devices - it will just play one view, like the left image.

Now one thing noted in the demos above (and when recording on an iPhone) is that spatial videos capped out at 1080 HD.

The presentation doesn’t offer any info on what specs they’ll support with 3D - it only states that 2D videos have 4K support with a 90Hz refresh rate (or 96Hz for 24 fps videos).

What about mixed reality?

One of the most talked about shots from the Vison Pro announcement video was the floating 3D basketball court with virtual players right in the middle of the living room.

We’re already getting teasers of the technology that’s going to make this happen.

We had the NFL Toy Story telecast, where the game was streamed inside Andy’s room and all the players were tracked in real-time and turned into CG characters.

Andy Etches, the founder of Rezzil, an AR and VR sports tracking company, just dropped an awesome demo clip of an NBA game being tracked in real time and displayed in AR on a floating court.

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SECOND UNIT

Did Bending Spoons Just Break Filmic?

Bending Spoons, the company that acquired the pro iPhone video app Filmic, just laid off all 22 members of Filmic’s team, as first reported by PetaPixel.

According to The Verge, a Bending Spoons spokesperson said Filmic “has now been fully integrated into the Bending Spoons platform.”

Filmic is/was a groundbreaking app that showed what was possible to create with an iPhone.

We had Tangerine, the first iPhone feature. High Flying Bird, Steven Soderbergh’s Netflix film, shot on an iPhone 8. Even Apple would use Filmic in their original Shot on iPhone spots and featured their DoubleTake app in one of their keynotes.

Our analysis: since Bending Spoons took over they revamped the pricing model from an indie-friendly flat rate to a $50 a year subscription. It was not very popular.

First they increased revenue. Now they’re taking some drastic cost-cutting measures.

There’s also a big, magical elephant in the room.

Blackmagic’s new camera app, which is 100% free and does just about everything Filmic does. It was also the app Apple used to film their latest keynote on the iPhone 15 Pro.

Will Filmic as we know it survive? We’ll see.

VIDEO VILLAGE

AKS

🌐 Around the Web

🎨 Rosco updates their myColor Mobile App; features a palette builder and in-depth color information

👩🏻‍💻 Cosmos is a new AI powered video search app that runs locally on your machine

📱 The KIRI Engine app enables 3D Gaussian Splatting on Android

🗓 Schedule posts and track your social media with Metricool*

👔 Adam Callaway tapped to spearhead Brompton Technology's virtual production and broadcast initiatives

🏫 Austin Parenti launches The King’s Academy's virtual production program in West Palm Beach.

* Sponsored Link

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