Bright future for VR production

Alex Klive, founder and CEO of San Francisco-based 360 Designs, sees a lucrative future for Virtual Reality (VR). Although it is still in its infancy, Klive believes 360-degree live streaming of sports, concerts and other live events is the next advancement for the entertainment industry.

Founded in 2015, 360 Designs manufactures high-end professional 360-degree cameras, rigs, and live streaming solutions for VR. The company serves top broadcasters, and Internet and production companies, and has recently had its cameras at Coachella, a range of music and film events at SXSW, and the OSCARS capturing professional-quality VR video.

Klive's creative ventures also include web publishing, a "Create your own TV Channel" web application and an early crowdsourcing project to document the world in 24 hours at the turning of the Millennium. He has a background in reporting and videography, and turned to Video Devices and its PIX-E5 4K recording monitors when seeking a solution to help 360 Designs make VR production simpler and more reliable.

"We were already familiar with Sound Devices audio gear, and discovered the PIX-E Series while looking for a robust, portable 4K capture solution," says Klive. "We were attracted to the PIX-E5, in particular, because its small form factor can be integrated well with our high-end VR camera rigs."

360 Designs has been using large numbers of PIX-E5 recorders on its custom higher resolution VR rigs. "We're able to build the recorders directly into the rig, typically using cheese plates, and use SDI to capture the uncompressed output from the cameras," adds Klive. "We wanted reliable 4K Apple ProRes 422 HQ recording. In a standard configuration, we're capturing one 4K camera per PIX-E recorder, and we build custom wiring looms to bring SDI and power to each recorder. We've also created a remote control system that allows us to trigger all of the recorders at once. We really appreciate the file naming options with the PIX-E5, and the ability to save and load settings across different devices has been a big time saver. We're typically using a lot of recorders at once, so this aspect was key for us." (6/16)

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