Published On: April 3rd, 2024data-orig-src=https://www.sgo.es/wp-content/uploads/qatar-portrait.webp width=1920 height=1080 class=lazyload wp-image-0 />
To stand out from the crowd and position itself as a premier destination for global travellers, Visit Qatar showcases its landscapes and culture through cutting-edge shared immersive experiences. Co-produced by Visualise, Abaco Digital, and Zita Films, the captivating content was tailored for display on large high-resolution LED screens, with Mistika VR playing a central role in the post-production process.
According to the CEO at Visualise, Henry Stuart, the goal of this project was to create an immersive showcase that would captivate attendees at global tourism trade shows and events.
The project had an immediate impact on Qatar Tourism - winning the best stand feature in the World Travel Market and pulling in potential customers and interested parties. The content was so effective it has been used in travel markets internationally now for over a year, with different versions developed for different screens every quarter.
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To create a series of immersive screens that virtually transport you to Qatar, the team captured picturesque landscapes, tourism sites, marketplaces, and cultural moments in super high-resolution 360 video, despite not using the full spherical projection. The final output resolution of the shots was 12500 x 6250 pixels, but shooting in 360 allows for the footage to be used in other ways in the future.
DP'd by Ignacio Ferrando Margel of Abaco Digital and Jack stergaard-Churchill from Visualise, the project utilized the Meta 3 camera system, designed specifically for high-resolution immersive productions with a focus on big-screen playback. Dynamic shots were achieved through the use of remote-controlled dollies and heavy-load bearing drones, with drone footage expertly captured by Pablo Ballester from Zita Films despite challenging weather conditions.
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Pixel-perfect results with Mistika VR The post-production started on-set, with the DIT and rough stitcher Matthew Stevens taking the daily rushes and creating quick low-resolution stitches in Mistika VR and beginning to build the editing process. Once the filming was complete, Jack stergaard-Churchill then fine-tuned the stitching using Mistika VR, leveraging essential features like optical flow for enhanced stitch quality. Optical flow is always essential to give our stitches that final brush' to improve the quality. Given the majority of the shots on this project involved movement, the optical flow really helped blend the stitch lines in some of the challenge locations and movements.
The workflow continued in Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects for editing and clean-up, with stabilization achieved through a combination of Mocha Pro, Syntheyes, and manual tracking within After Effects.
One of the biggest post-production challenges was working with time-consuming high-resolution content. Stuart highlighted the importance of a sensible proxy workflow, stating, Creating a practical proxy workflow was crucial for this project. We made proxy stitches using Mistika VR for fast offline editing, then converted them to high-resolution footage for final cleanup.
Steering away from Giantism' As Henry Stuart continues to explain, challenges related to shooting content for a large LED volume have arisen, being very different from creating content for a headset, especially because of the relatively limited field of view in the vertical plane, rather than being able to look anywhere up and down as you can in a VR headset.
Another issue is giantism' if you have people too close to the camera - closer than the screens are to the people watching it, then the relative size of those people on screen is exaggerated, breaking the illusion of immersion.
Additionally, projecting onto non-standard screen shapes required innovative solutions, such as building a VR preview experience to streamline the content adjustment process.
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Shared Immersive Experiences as a Future Looking to the future, Stuart emphasized the potential of shared immersive experiences in live events. He concluded, These types of immersive setups offer a shared experience that holds immense potential
