Winter Wonderland All the tech at Olympics Milano Cortina

IBC

First-Person-View drones, expanded real-time 360-degree replays, stroboscopic replays, dynamic graphics, cinematic cameras and a massive virtualized production setup make Milano Cortina 2026 a major step forward in immersive, scalable and sustainable Olympic broadcasting.

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“We are not tech narcissists,” insists Yiannis Exarchos, CEO, Olympic Broadcasting Services. “We have a team which is fully immersed in technology but we always need to remember that this is about telling the stories of the most important athletes in the world and the values and the emotions that are being generated by them.”

Nonetheless, the OBS which has responsibility for delivering official coverage across successive Games, continues to unleash an arsenal of technologies that meet the expectations of its media rights holders (MRH) and to reach as many demographics as possible with a huge variety of types of content and formats.

At the Winter Games in Italy next month this includes an expansion in the use of IP related systems to produce and distribute 6500 hours of coverage. 5600 hours of that is non-competition coverage and includes VR and vertical video for mobile phones as well as behind the scenes material. AI is helping automating highlights creation for rights holders to tailor content and a bespoke new language model ‘Olympic GPT’ is being debuted for use by anyone to quiz Olympic content and search results on the IOC website.

Distributed venues

The biggest challenge for Milano Cortina is the distributed nature of the main venues which seems unprecedented. Milan is the base for less than half the athletes with others based in the mountains to the North at Cortina, Livigno and Tesero. Connectivity is notoriously patchy in the Dolomites and one of OBS’ most important jobs, partnering with Telecom Italia, was to secure capacity. Even then physical transport between site is not practical, meaning many broadcasters and stakeholder like FIS, the international ski federation, have to double up their presence.

It also means the opening ceremony featuring performances from Mariah Carey and Andrea Bocelli is distributed geographically.  The absence of ‘clusterisation’ - putting many venues together – “does create significant operational challenges and also additional costs,” Exarchos admitted. “And in Milano Cortina people cannot easily move from one site to another. Despite having teams of athletes in all four locations we want to have a sense of unity, especially in the parade of nations. We want them to feel that they are parading together at the same time. We did a very detailed rehearsal a couple of months ago that went very well and I believe that because of the size of these places, their incredible beauty and the tradition that exists locally, the atmosphere is going be fantastic.”

Thousands of hours of coverage

OBS will provide 6,500+ hours to MRHs of which 900+hours are dedicated to live action and 5,600+ hours for additional content.  With Samsung, OBS will broadcast to mobile using a feed filmed on mobile phones.

Unlike other major sports events like Uefa Champions League, the Olympics continues to capture in 4K UHD HDR “reflecting the industry’s growing adoption of higher-resolution and high dynamic range workflows,” it says. Down-scalers will convert content to 1080p HD 50, ensuring compatibility with HD broadcasters while supporting the transition to UHD HDR.

8K production will be implemented for the Opening and Closing Ceremonies, as well as for figure skating and short track speed skating, in partnership with CMG.  In addition, OBS has deployed an 8K theatre at the IBC, enabling broadcasters and partners to experience content at the highest resolution.

 

Key components of the virtual production

OBS production for Milano Cortina is significantly more virtualised and remote than at any previous Olympics, representing a clear evolution in the delivery of live sports coverage.

“MC26 marks a turning point in Olympic broadcasting, cloud integration and remote production,” says Isidoro Moreno, OBS Head of Engineering. “At these Games, software-defined broadcasting (SBD) is driving the shift towards the virtualisation of core OBS operations. This approach creates a reimagined broadcast environment where cloud technology, remote workflows, and AI-powered tools work together, transforming how content is captured, managed, and delivered.”

Central to this transformation is the shift away from traditional, hardware-heavy OB vans towards a virtualised OB van (VOB) model built on a private, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) cloud infrastructure. Following a successful proof of concept at curling in Beijing 2022, this model is now fully deployed at three venues (curling stadium, sliding centre, speed skating stadium) for the Games. The VOBs have led to a reduction in compound space by more than 50%, cutting power consumption by up to 50% in some cases, and enabling full remote production with the same operational capabilities as conventional OB vans.

OBS is also introducing fully virtual Technical Operations Centres (TOCs) for the first time at an Olympic Games, replacing on-site technical rooms with remote, dashboard-based operations for signal transmission to the International Broadcast Centre (IBC). The TOCs will be deployed at four venues (both ice hockey venues, and the venues for figure skating/short track speed skating and speed skating)

In parallel, OBS is piloting a fully cloud-based Master Control Room, enabling remote feed switching and management while minimising physical infrastructure and on-site staffing.

The IBC in Milan is a quarter size smaller than in Beijing 2022 with a 33% reduction in power. Building on this experience, the model planned for Dakar 2026 Summer Youth Games is expected to require 75% less rack space and consume 65% less power at OBS HQ, and a 50% faster IBC rollout, with systems operational two months before the Games.

Hundreds of specialist cameras

OBS will deploy more than 810 camera systems across the Games, including a wide range of specialty systems designed to enhance immersion, storytelling and analysis.

POV capture is delivered through multiple solutions. In ski and snowboard cross, goggle cameras are deployed rather than helmet cameras to provide a more natural athlete perspective. Additionally, in partnership with Worldwide TOP Partner Alibaba, OBS produces short-term, on demand VR 360-degree videos from athletes’ perspectives, optimised for social media platforms.

Across outdoor sports, OBS will operate 24 drones, nearly double the number used at Beijing, including 15 First-Person-View drones and nine traditional drones. Making their Olympic Winter Games debut, FPV drones are small and agile, able to follow athletes along the field of play and deliver a thrilling first-person perspective that highlights speed and skill.

OBS will deploy 32 cinematic cameras, first introduced at Paris 2024, to capture key storytelling moments: from athletes arriving and preparing to compete to celebrating victories and behind-the-scenes interactions with crowds and teammates. With a shallow depth of field, these cameras draw focus to human emotion, capturing moments of intensity or joy. Enhanced colour, texture, and detail amplify the emotional impact. New for Milano Cortina 2026, the cameras will also support on-screen graphic overlays such as athlete names.

Replay innovation continues to advance rapidly. A total of 17 AI-powered real-time 360° replay systems, developed in collaboration with Alibaba, will be deployed across 17 sports and disciplines, up from 10 at Beijing 2022, enabling multi angle, frozen frame and slow-motion analysis. In parallel, 12 stroboscopic replay systems, developed with Alibaba and Omega, will be deployed across 15 sports and disciplines, compared with only one system utilised at Beijing. Using AI, these systems highlight key body positions and movement trajectories in a single, easy to follow visual sequence.

Innovative perspectives

In addition, several other sports will feature innovative camera angles:

Curling: An overhead rail camera spans the full length of the sheet, capturing the movement and speed of play. Combined with cameras close to the ice, this setup delivers dynamic angles, immersive replays, and visuals that highlight athlete emotion and the intensity of the competition.

Figure Skating: An on-ice camera operator will capture cinematic close-ups before and after competition routines, as well as full skating performances on the ice during the gala.

Biathlon: AI-driven camera systems allow MRHs to spotlight national athletes, offering personalised, real-time coverage of shooting lanes with live data and split-screen options.

AI-augmented and automated workflows

OBS uses AI to produce highlights at scale, quickly and efficiently, for both OBS and MRHs. A proof-of-concept was completed at Gangwon 2024, and the system was launched at Paris 2024 with 14 sports and disciplines, generating more than 100,000 highlights – a volume impossible manually. At Milano Cortina 2026, the system will be available for all sports. It is fully customisable, allowing highlights to be tailored by length, athletes, sport, nationality, competition parameters, archived content, and even reframing horizontal broadcasts into vertical formats for social platforms.

OBS is testing an Automatic Media Description platform to manage the vast volume of live video. AI breaks broadcasts into searchable clips, suggests shot descriptions and keywords, and helps teams quickly find key moments and highlights, making storytelling faster, more efficient, and easier to scale.

Olympic athletes also have access to AI-driven highlights from their own competitions for dissemination on their own socials which Excharcos calls “a major breakthrough.”

Expanded 5G contribution

For the Opening Ceremony, a private 5G network will be deployed, enabling more than 20 Samsung mobile devices to capture backstage and on-field activity using advanced 5G transmission. Dedicated mobile feeds and vertical video outputs will allow MRHs to share the energy and atmosphere of the event in real time, offering dynamic, social-first coverage.

On-screen graphics advances

Aside from the stroboscopic replay and 360° replay systems key graphic techniques include:

• Live course and position tracking: Tools such as Course Tracker, Position on Course, and Pinning visually follow athletes in real time, showing location, ranking, speed, and progress directly on the course or within the live image.
• Cross Country and Nordic Combined course mapping: Viewers can track up to three athletes or groups simultaneously on a dynamic course map, including live gaps and relative positions over long distances.
• Comparison and performance-to-leader graphics: ‘Virtual Line to Beat’, ‘Live Speed / Live Delta’, and ‘Comparison to Leader’ provide instant context on how competitors are performing relative to the fastest athlete or group.
• Terrain and effort visualisation: Incline and gradient analysis show elevation profiles and terrain difficulty in relation to athlete position.
• Course animations: Used across multiple sports to explain course layout, key technical sections, and race flow, helping viewers understand competition before and during events.
• Team Radio graphics: New to alpine skiing coverage, these visuals highlight real-time communication between athletes and coaches, giving insight into strategic and emotional moments immediately before a run.

AI-powered stone tracking in curling

Exarchos says, “We have been trying for many years to find a way to help viewers understand what's going on in curling because most have the perception that it's a simple throw of a stone that glides along the ice. Curling is an incredibly technical sport and unless you really understand the technical difficulty you can’t fully appreciate the effort and the capabilities of these athletes.

“Now, with the use of AI technology, this is possible.  In parallel with live video of the competition itself you see the rotations of the stone not just its location of the stone. You also understand the frequency of the sweeping that team members do and why.”

Social media content, formats and delivery

At every venue, OBS has dedicated digital producers working alongside venue teams to identify and capture moments for digital and social platforms. Their role goes beyond content curation. They guide live production teams to adopt a digital-first mindset, encouraging camera operators and directors to capture crowd reactions, behind-the-scenes rituals, and other moments that add depth to the venue’s visual narrative.

Platform-native social media creators also capture human-interest stories and behind-the-scenes footage using mobile devices. Curated content is uploaded to OBS’ Content+ platform, making it instantly available for MRHs to enrich their coverage.

In addition, OBS offers MRHs influencer positions within venues, allowing broadcasters to position their own creators near key action areas, such as athlete arrival zones, warm-up spaces, and podiums, to capture authentic, social-first content using mobile or 360° cameras. This approach helps broadcasters engage younger, mobile-first audiences with personality-driven storytelling and unique perspectives that resonate on social media platforms.

Future planning

OBS is already planning for the IBC at LA28 to be half the size of what the IBC was in Rio whilst producing more than two times the amount of content.

Its partnership with Chinese cloud solutions provider Alibaba began in 2018 ahead of the pandemic delayed Tokyo Games is not only the basis of its ability to virtualise these operations but is significant because the IOC/OBS rely on such third party tech partners to help fund innovation.

“When Alibaba came into the Games, they were Cloud sponsors and we were thinking of our administration systems and stuff like that,” says Exarchos. “They approach us to ask ‘how about broadcast? We started talking and we both realized that there's something there. They have been great partners. We developed Virtual OB van capability with Intel (no longer a partner) and we're looking into such opportunities with Omega.”

In Brisbane 2032 the target is an IBC, which will be essentially the size of the Winter Olympics rather than the Summer Games “and probably be able to do much more. We do not know how to do this yet but we try to be agile.”

Such long term planning and efficiency savings would not be possible, he argued, if individual host broadcasters were still in charge of each games, rather than the internal IOC broadcasting division.

Horror Film Good Boy: Ben Leonberg on His Directorial Debut

postPerspective

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A haunted house horror story told from the perspective of a dog is the story behind the indie film Good Boy, the feature debut of Ben Leonberg, who co-wrote the script with Alex Cannon. He also directed, photographed and edited the 72-minute film over a three-year period, with help from his wife Kari Fischer (also the film’s producer) and with their own dog, Indy, as the star.

Positive word of mouth at its SXSW premiere has continued since its release into cinemas by IFC, turning the microbudget indie drama into a viral hit. In fact, Good Dog has gotten some award love recently, including as a Top 10 Independent Film of 2025 by the National Board of Review, and it was nominated in the Best Editing category at the 2026 Independent Spirit Awards.

Leonberg and Fischer adapted their own home in a rural part of New York state into a creepy haunted house set for Indy, a red-haired Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, to play in.

As Leonberg explains, the dog had no idea it was making a movie, nor did they teach Indy any new tricks or commands. “He has no understanding of marks or cues, and he spent most of the shoot napping. Yet his on-screen presence is so magnetic that I put the whole movie on his oblivious little shoulders.”

Good Boy might appear to have come out of nowhere, but you have a solid background as a filmmaker. Can you explain?
Like a lot of people my age, I grew up making movies on VHS tapes and MiniDV. I didn’t have a formal film school education, so I was kind of self-taught, especially on the technical side. I learned how to make movies with a group of friends, shooting sketches for improv or making little commercials for the businesses in the town where I went to college. When I got into the real world, my first gig was in advertising for athletic apparel at Adidas and Reebok.

I started out as a one-man band filming smaller assets, such as a football player throwing a ball around with high school kids. This was during the DSLR revolution of 2009-2010, and I was one of the first people at Reebok and Adidas who knew how to use those cameras. My experience and crews grew, and although I never made a Super Bowl commercial, I did make one for the Stanley Cup.

I decided to go to film school at Columbia University for my master’s because I had never really taken a screenwriting class or a real directing class. I returned to my commercials work at a different level and with a new focus, and I began developing Good Boy on the side until we felt it was ready.

What was the light bulb moment that made you want to dedicate the best part of four years working on this story?
It came to me after watching Poltergeist, probably for the millionth time. If you remember, it begins with a golden retriever wandering through the house, aware of the haunting before the humans catch on. I thought somebody should tell a story entirely from that kind of character’s point of view: The dog who knows better.

There’s something so creepy about that in a horror movie, where you can’t help but imagine the worst. Even though it’s a traditional haunted house story, because we’re seeing it from Indy’s POV, it’s almost like we’re seeing a side of the story we haven’t seen before. As someone who loves dogs and grew up with them, I felt like that was a movie I would want to see.

I already had a technical background, but after my MA, I finally understood that story is the most important part. Everything flows from story. I became interested in how making every shot either of the dog or from his point of view could unfold a narrative in a new way.

The problem, of course, is that you can’t say to a dog, “Just look a little bit over here” or “Stop on this mark” the way you can to an actor.

I started making test films with Indy to figure out how to do even the basics, like shot/reverse shot for an actor who doesn’t know he’s in a movie. What sustained me was that I believed in the idea. Plus, I like a challenge.

To what extent did you storyboard the film?
Like most scripts, we worked on Good Boy for a long time before starting to film. The conceptual challenge was trying to stick to the rules of a canine protagonist. He’s not going to be able to speak. He’s limited to doing what a dog can actually do, so it was about using those limitations as an asset. The discipline meant telling the story from the point of view of what Indy sees, smells or hears.

Storyboards were super-important, and I created them on an iPad. I’m not a very good illustrator. They were stick figures, but the most important thing I got from doing it was the idea of how to use shot size, what angle the camera should be in relation to the line of action, and lens choice. Plus, Indy has a very neutral but intense expression, so can I use that to tell the story?

How did you solve the challenge of getting repeatable takes with Indy?
I would spend the day setting up the shot, doing everything from rearranging the props to doing the electrics. Sometimes, since this is an old house, I literally had to create outlets in places where none existed before. In the time I had left, I’d look at the previous day’s footage.

As unusual as the film is,  we applied the fundamentals of filmmaking quite practically. We would approach a scene logically. You’d start with the widest coverage, then work your way in to a close-up. That’s conventional to shooting, lighting and managing props, but with Indy, it was also an opportunity to set his blocking as we moved in.

Let’s say there’s a scene where Indy walks into a new space. I’d have a wide-angle shot of the room, then he would walk in and freeze because he hears a strange noise. We might shoot this 40 times, from which there might be eight usable takes. In each of those eight takes, he is hitting very different marks, so I have to pick one and then adapt the rest of the shots with lighting design, props and so on to match.

Every day, it was like making a bespoke custom setup that was in relation to what we had done either the day before or, in some cases, weeks or years before. In addition to that unusual way of making the film, I would often roll the camera and then run around to get into the shot with Indy because I was also training him and standing in as the body of the human actor. That was another level of complexity added on top.

At what point did you decide that Red was the right camera for this film?
When I got into commercials, I had used the Red One for years and had known it well. It was a camera I had worked on in the equipment room in my grad program at Columbia, so while I had experience with a lot of different cameras, I completely knew the Red ecosystem and workflow.

I’d filmed tests with Indy on a Red One, and one of the things I realized was that it was going to be extremely beneficial to shoot at a higher resolution than our ultimate delivery. To get the best framing for Indy, I would want to have the ability to crop and reframe in post.

As mentioned, he can’t hit exact marks. I was almost approaching every setup a little bit wider and a little bit further back through the lens or the camera placement so I could then reframe to account for Indy’s variability. That’s when the Red Dragon came into the equation. We started out with a Red Dragon-X 5K and then upgraded the firmware so it could shoot 6K, which was perfect for us. I was already comfortable using the camera, and the extra resolution enabled us to reframe in post. That was one of the most important reasons to shoot on this camera.

What was your lens choice?
The Red has a very color-accurate, clinical representation of the world as a baseline, which you can push against using older glass. I wanted to marry the bold color you can get from the high-dynamic-range of the camera with a more textured, handmade look through vintage lenses. I tried several different versions, including Leica and Canon FD, but I really like the Nikon AI lenses, both for how they looked and their focal range.

The hero lens of the film is a 15mm specialty wide-angle lens. It’s got a lot of quirks. It can’t focus to infinity until you get to f8 or above, but because it’s a real wide-angle lens that isn’t full of fisheye distortion, it’s perfect for a canine face. Normally, if you were to use that kind of a lens for a close-up on a person, it would not be super-flattering, but for Indy, it produces a beautiful shot because he has a big, long nose and big ears that stick out to the side. It’s a close-up, but you have a beautiful, deep background behind him that you wouldn’t otherwise get if you were shooting on the standard 35mm, 50mm or 75mm lenses that get used for close-ups of human actors.

What was your editing package?
I edited in Adobe Premiere partly because the Red workflow with Adobe is so streamlined. It’s fast and nimble, especially with the way that we were shooting. The ease of adding to my DIT log every single day and logging shots, tracking what was working, and numbering shots was practical. These mundane but important administrative-type functions were super-critical in making it all work.

How did you store and manage the high-resolution files?
The short answer is: with a lot of storage! I must credit my post supervisor, Michael Cacioppo Belantara [of NY boutique Alchemist Post], and my colorist, Jeff Sousa. From other projects I’ve done, I know how much Red RAW R3D can bring things to life. Jeff and I were very much aligned in the look we wanted to achieve, embracing what was already great about the Red footage and taking into account our aesthetic and lighting choices.  I edited in Premiere using proxy files and then reconformed for Jeff to grade from the R3Ds.

Over 400-plus days, I had a lot of unusable footage, and I didn’t throw things out as I was going. I’m sure I could have saved hard drive space if I had, but it felt like bad practice to be deleting potentially usable footage. It’s around 73 terabytes of R3D footage. Also, I’m a DIT purist, so I had it backed up in triplicate. We spent a lot on hard drives.

Sound is a big part of any horror movie. How did you approach sound on Good Boy?
From the very beginning, my co-writer and I were thinking about how sound would play in this horror. There are scenes where Indy is at the top of the stairs, looking down at an empty space, and we tried to figure out how long we could sustain those pauses and beats of tense silence. We knew sound was going to be really important.

Brian Goodheart [co-producer and re-recording engineer] marshalled the whole post sound team and was involved from the start. He wasn’t on-set, but he was always seeing cuts and getting the raw production audio as well, which was not usable. It was almost all thrown out and then rebuilt in post.

Brian was responsible for the rebuild of the natural soundscape — the things that should be there diegetically. He worked with mixers and designer Kelly Oostman to add supernatural textures that accentuate tone and tension. Then, with composer Sam Boase-Miller, they each took a pass at the film. We’d get a pass with all natural sounds, then another version of the movie with just the supernatural sound design, and then a version just with musical swatches, then final music as we got further along.  As the director, it was great to be able to isolate the sounds and music and see how we could blur them to create tension or elevate some scenes. I’m passionate about sound, and it was a huge part of the odyssey to make this film.

Are you fighting off other point-of-view pet pictures, or do you want to do something completely different?
I’m very excited for my next film. I’m committed to a project that will have human actors who know they’re in a movie. I have gotten a few animal scripts sent my way, which is fun, but I don’t think I’ll make a pet movie for movie No. 2.

What I certainly will do is continue to use perspective in a unique and novel way. Not to chase a gimmick — the camera’s not always going to be on the ceiling for the next movie — but to see how I can use perspective, subtle lens choices and technology that backs it up to tell a story that, even though it might seem like it has familiar beats, looks very new and fresh because of the way it’s told.

Grammy winning artists set gold standard for stadium shows with RED Cine‑Broadcast

my interview & words for RED Digital Cinema

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2025 was a banner year for Fuse Technical Group, highlighted by high‑profile projects including 48 dates of Grammy‑winning, multi‑Platinum R&B artist Chris Brown’s Breezy Bowl XX Tour 2025 and the record‑setting closing concert of Zach Bryan’s Quittin’ Time Tour in Michigan. Fuse developed a unified technical blueprint that performed seamlessly across both productions, designing and building two custom camera systems to support the shows, which were staged in major stadium venues throughout the United States and Europe.

“Our key differentiator is the ability to reinvent the industry with custom solutions,” says Ben Johnson, project manager for Fuse. “When you call us, you are connecting with the most skilled, creative collection of brain power in the staging industry. RED Cine-Broadcast is our flagship system now. When someone wants our best option, it is RED.”

Johnson notes that Fuse has been receiving a lot of requests over the past few years for a cine-style broadcast solution. “We had tried a couple of systems but they simply were not as seamless as we needed it to be,” he explains. “We wanted a solution that would integrate fluently with our standard touring systems. When Justin Collie, live event production designer at Nimblist, requested a cinema option for Chris Brown around the same time that RED announced their Cine-Broadcast system, the timing worked out perfectly. We didn’t want to go down any other route.”

Fuse designed and built a camera system based around a Ross Ultrix media processing platform and another system around Grass Valley K-Frame. Fuse purchased 17 V-RAPTOR XL cameras with Cine-Broadcast modules and base stations to integrate seamlessly with their infrastructure, which already included 360-degrees of LED screens of ROE Visual CB5 and a Disguise GX3 media server package and all lights, video and rigging for Brown.

“We had multiple RED cameras on the show plus all the SMPTE fiber connectors,” explains Josiah Battles, video director on Brown’s Breezy Bowl XX Tour. “There have definitely been times with other camera products where I’ve not had as much support from the camera company, but RED was different, and I felt very comfortable knowing they were there. They were extremely helpful in prepping the show and I was excited by the final result.”

The camera package comprised two V-RAPTOR for front of house with 24-300 Fujinon Devo zooms; another in the Concourse with a 25-1000 lens; one or two wireless handheld V-RAPTOR on stage with 14-100mm; three cameras mounted on remotely operated dollies (supplied by Luna Remote Systems) and two Tower cams 26ft above the stage also with 24-300 Duos. Battles augmented the REDs with Sony PTZs which he was able to color match by applying a RED LUT.

“The goal was to try to keep the zoom lenses with a focal length between 2.8 and 5.0,” he explains. “We were able to see that shallow depth of field many times during the show and especially when Chris would sing to the Tower cameras.”

Beautifully cinematic sharp foregrounds against blurred backgrounds are only one of the advantages of using larger sensor cine cameras in a broadcast environment.

“The dynamic range step was a big step forward,” Battles says. “Even the design team at front of house, who aren't necessarily video technicians were immediately able to recognize the difference with these cameras. Previously, when Chris was on stage you couldn’t see his face clearly all the time on the IMAGs, especially in the dark. With RED they could. That alone was enough for them to appreciate that what a cine camera can do.”

The Log workflow to capture the extra detail in the bright and dark areas was new to the production team. Shooting Log gives the video files a higher dynamic range than a standard gamma curve. The camera Log files were fed to a central disguise media server and synced with a change in color space to the final Rec.2020 HDR image.

“The biggest draw for Fuse with RED’s Cine-Broadcast system was being able to bring a cinema camera into our established infrastructure of Ross and Grass Valley switchers for remote color grading. All the LUTs are applied in the server so the camera operators don’t need to worry about shading,” Johnson says. “It's definitely a different workflow than a standard broadcast show or even a standard touring show.”

Battles adds, “After that it wasn’t hard to sell them on keeping these cameras at all. Even the lighting designer told me that now he doesn't have to light for the camera as much as before. He can design lighting for the whole show knowing that RED is going to capture all the detail whether in deep contrast or extreme brightness and display that on screen.”

The global shutter of the V-RAPTOR crisply captured all the laser lights and pyrokinetics without the strobing or motion blur familiar to cine cameras with rolling shutter, a prerequisite in live event production.

“Whatever the camera was showing on screen was true to the effect in the venue,” Battles reports. “The lighting team began experimenting with the lasers from show to show, remodeling the refresh rates of the lasers, depending on the kind of look they were going for.

When multi-Platinum, Grammy-winning country singer-songwriter Zach Bryan set the record for the largest ticketed U.S. concert in history last September he did so with 112,408 fans enjoying the full scale, energy, and atmosphere of the historic night in astounding cinematic imaging.

“Their key request was to shoot a cinematic version of the show,” recalls Johnson. “However, they also wanted to minimize the loss of seats which meant we couldn't introduce a whole set of additional cameras. Instead, we converted the touring camera system to a cine-broadcast system. And that's where RED came in.”

The set-up was a spectacular finale to the Quittin’ Time Tour which began in 2023. Fuse was proud to support the milestone event at Michigan’s famed “Big House,” integrating a fleet of RED Digital Cinema V-RAPTOR XL cameras with Cine-Broadcast Modules into a live multi-camera broadcast workflow.

Another exciting creative advantage for artists with RED Cine-Broadcast is the ability to create different looks for songs in their set.

Battles explains, “You can do a black-and-white grade for one song or really enhance the pinks and reds for another or bring down all the contrast in the next. You could even do this verse by verse because all of the looks can be time-coded, programmed and played back via the server. It means the design team has more control over the final look. The look can be more cohesive and the show even more dynamic.”

A challenge with any concert lighting is capturing the true vibrancy of colors like reds and purples in camera. “With RED we can grade the live output in DaVinci Resolve and really bring out those reds and purples for certain songs. Being able to grade is the money right there.”

Many artists also tour with their own content creation team, capturing material for social media. Now, that content can be captured and produced cinematically.

“The content lead for Chris Brown came to me and said he wished we had footage in log so he could grade it,” Battles recalls. “This year, I said that’s possible now that we have our RED workflow. We have hours of 12G Raw footage ready to grade. They also shoot their own behind the scenes footage using KOMODO, shooting Raw for the grade and which goes viral all the time on social media. Now that the RED concert cameras blend with their RED cameras, it boosts the whole overall production of those social media posts.”

The RED Cine-Broadcast Module allows live event and music productions to leverage world class image quality for their shows while slotting seamlessly into standard broadcast workflows. It’s a package that Fuse Technical Group will continue to deliver for artists and venues of the highest caliber.

“RED Cine-Broadcast is the first camera system Fuse has owned that has been able to integrate with SMPTE fiber, the cable stock we've been using for a long time in broadcast and touring,” Johnson concludes. “It’s exciting for us to have an infrastructure that we're already very familiar with alongside a cinema broadcast camera that brings amazing images. We’ve also built flypacks for touring and remote live event work and it was great to be able to integrate RED Cine-Broadcast directly into those. It's flyable. It’s travelable. It’s Go Global. Anywhere.”

 

MovieLabs builds on two decades of achievement in film and TV to become the guiding voice for the future of media creation

written for MovieLabs

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At a time when media and entertainment faces changes from everywhere all at once, MovieLabs offers a clearer vision and path for the future. For two decades it has built practical solutions to real world problems by working closely together with industry stakeholders.  It’s an approach that has produced tangible results. Whether lifting media out of proprietary silos, mapping a path toward collaboration in the cloud or guiding the secure, interoperable use of artificial intelligence, the primary focus is never about technology for technology’s sake. It is to empower creative teams to be able to achieve more. If workflows can adapt to new situations and technologies, then creativity can be more flexible. If production processes are automated and sped up without losing creative control, there’s simply more of the most precious resource – time.

Despite its foundation by Hollywood Studios with the name ‘Movie’ in the title, these ideas have resonated far beyond film and TV. In January 2025, the independent research lab launched the MovieLabs Industry Forum to embrace new members with companies spanning technology to talent, from global industry leader to start-up. The collective aim is to enable creativity with greater efficiency and flexibility, in the knowledge that no one company can do so alone. “The MovieLabs 2030 Vision is now the industry’s vision for the future of media creation,” says Richard Berger, MovieLabs’ CEO.

The MovieLabs origin story

At the time of founding in 2006, the film and TV industry was beginning a generational transition away from physical media to digital delivery. This required the entire infrastructure for distribution and protection to be standardized and upgraded with more efficient, more secure workflows using the latest technologies and software systems. For 15 years the organization’s efforts were central to a number of standards, common specifications and best practices that streamlined and automated distribution chains and secured creative assets. The goal was always to deliver new experiences to viewing audiences worldwide. Its achievements include a suite of specifications for online distribution (MovieLabs Digital Distribution Framework / MDDF) and the Entertainment ID Registry (EIDR), a universal unique identifier for content that automated digital distribution of film and TV titles just as UPC codes had revolutionized traditional retail. Both technologies won technical Emmy’s for their contribution to the industry. Further work devising the Enhanced Content Protection (ECP) scheme helped secure digital content for consumer distribution of new formats including UltraHD and HDR. Widely implemented since 2013, the latest updates to ECP were published in August 2024 in response to evolving threats.

Launching the 2030 Vision

In 2019, while continuing to innovate in distribution, MovieLabs opened a parallel track in media creation. Building on its heritage as a forum for cross company cooperation, MovieLabs engaged its studio members and, crucially, the wider production, postproduction and technology community. It quickly found alignment around a bold vision that extended production, post and VFX into the cloud, commonly referred to as the MovieLabs 2030 Vision. It helped that MovieLabs is an independent non-profit. Since it doesn’t make products or services it is not in competition with any of the companies it works with, clearing the way to focus on a common agenda. “We could bring in market competitors to sit side by side in our meetings and on our panels,” says Berger. “We have competing cloud companies and creative application companies talking together. This is essential to achieve interoperability. Our formula is to be very transparent about where we’re going and what we’re doing.” The outcome was a blueprint for the evolution of media creation. This 10-year plan for a more efficient media pipeline established principals for moving all assets to the cloud, for a security and access methodology based on Zero Trust and for standardized deployment of software-defined workflows.

Additionally, MovieLabs has released the Ontology for Media Creation (OMC) and continues to extend its functionality. The OMC is a set of defined terms and a common data model enabling interoperability between people, organizations, and software. “Creative enablement is at the heart of what we’re doing,” explains Berger. “We want to facilitate more secure, efficient, and interoperable media creation   workflows where creators can choose whichever tools and services they want and just know they’ll work seamlessly together. We’re enabling friction-free collaboration from wherever you are and whatever tools you’re on.” Fortunately, MovieLabs developed the concept before COVID hit when the entire world had to pivot to remote distributed connections overnight. In a post-pandemic world everyone understands there are many good reasons to keep doing it this way. Eddie Drake, SVP/CTO of Disney Studio Technology says, “The economic landscape has changed, but the Vision is still extremely relevant. While we have to be more efficient, we also have to enable the best experiences we can for the creative community.”

 

Practical action, tangible benefits

The 2030 Vision was never a prediction or a proscription; instead, it is the ‘North Star’ and blueprint to guide the industry. “The reason why the 2030 mission is still relevant is because it is a set of principles for making the future what we want it to be,” says Drake. Since every cog in the machine is moving at a different pace it was always likely that the transition in some parts of the industry will happen into the next decade. At the same time, dozens of companies have already implemented parts of the Vision. MovieLabs has been collecting some of these case studies as public reference points under the 2030 Showcase Program. This series of case studies recognizes an array of organizations including Lionsgate, Riot Games, Marvel Studios, the Royal Opera House and Accenture that are applying emerging cloud and production technologies in accordance with 2030 Vision principles.

MovieLabs is now working on the next phase of implementation. The 2030 Greenlight program matches technology companies with service providers and creatives to build and deploy solutions to everyday challenges and inefficiencies using the 2030 Vision as a template. According to Berger, “This process highlights gaps in the 2030 Vision, providing an honest assessment of what went well, where the industry needs to improve, and how the vendor community can help in solving issues.” “While we’ve made meaningful progress, there’s still important work ahead for the industry,” says Drake. “I’m excited to see the solutions we’ll build together.”

 

Dealing with the security challenge

Perhaps the biggest hurdle in the 2030 roadmap is production security. Swapping out decades of ingrained thinking in terms of locking down a physical facility to one based on a Zero Trust approach to data on a network is a monumental piece of change management. Berger explains, “Productions are naturally very risk-averse so changes to any aspect is very challenging. Most security today isn’t security by design. It is security as an add-on after the workflow has been designed. There’s a perception that better security will get in the way of the creative process but doesn’t need to be the case.”

MovieLabs has prioritized a Zero Trust education program and has also partnered with the Trusted Partner Network (TPN) which writes and maintains Motion Picture Association content security best practices. One of MovieLabs’ key messages is the principle of ‘least privilege’. This fundamental concept in information security states that a user, process, or program should have access to only the specific data, resources, and applications necessary to perform its intended function. Least privilege aims to minimize the risk of unauthorized access and misuse of sensitive information. “Security requires a lot of planning,” says Drake. “Applying Zero Trust to legacy infrastructure is tough. It’s easier when we can look at greenfield opportunities and design Zero Trust from scratch without legacy facilities.”

 

Industry Forum for dialogue

Work on developing and implementing the 2030 Vision is grounded in the MovieLabs Industry Forum. This provides a safe space for vendors and their clients to come together in frank discussions about interoperability, cloud workflows and metadata exchange. “Forum members can be there to tell us of a solution or advise on what we need to do to make the Vision a reality,” says Drake. “For us, the Forum is invaluable because we can provide insights that inform vendor roadmaps. We can talk about the technology challenges that we’re seeing with vendors who can then bring that information back to their dev teams and react to it.” He adds, “We also hear a lot from vendors that it’s much easier to enhance their products to reach the goals of the Vision when studios are all aligned. At the end of the day, we need to be working together to move the industry forward.” Yoshikazu Takashima, SVP Advanced Technology at Sony Pictures Entertainment agrees; “MovieLabs has access to a wide community of creatives, technologists and academics who can collectively test ideas far quicker than we could alone. We appreciate the honest, direct feedback we get at the Forum.”

 

Future media creation through 2030

As technology has converged and video as a communications tool has become ubiquitous, a far wider community of technology companies and creative businesses have coalesced around the 2030 Vision. The MovieLabs Industry Forum has expanded to facilitate common ground for any company that is actively re-inventing and re-tooling their supply chains in alignment with the 2030 Vision. Nearly 50 organizations as diverse as Final Draft, United Talent Agency, Prime Focus Technologies, and Bria.ai have joined forces with the Forum’s Leadership Council (Adobe, AWS, Avid, Dolby, DreamWorks Animation, Microsoft, Paramount Global, Skywalker Sound, Slalom, Sony Pictures Entertainment, The Walt Disney Studios, Universal Pictures, and Warner Bros. Discovery) to shape the future. The door is open to technology and creative service providers, application developers, production companies, and infrastructure providers. “Only by embracing expertise across the entire digital media value chain will the industry be able to align on, collaborate and solve issues common to all,” affirms Leon Silverman, Chair of the MovieLabs Industry Forum. Where some see only uncertainty and fragmentation, the MovieLabs Industry Forum points toward the future of media production.

 

Artificial Intelligence and 2030 Vision

No issue is more urgent than assessing the impact of Artificial Intelligence. There are many dimensions to the technology so it’s worth stressing that MovieLabs’ focus is on how AI can be applied in the context of helping achieve the 2030 Vision. “We coined the term IA (Intelligent Automation) as a powerful combination with AI,” says Berger. “That pairing can be very effective in taking some of the mundane tasks out of the workflow. Using AI for more creative tasks is a choice for creative teams like any other creative technology.” Pertinent questions for MovieLabs Industry Forum include ‘Can AI enhance interoperability?’ ‘Is there a common approach to improving GenAI outputs?’ ‘Would a standard vocabulary for training AI models be beneficial?’ And ‘How do you track the provenance of creations from both GenAI and humans within a workflow’? Since AI introduces new threats and security considerations – as well as potential solutions for defence – the risk and merits for content protection is another key consideration.

At a crucial point in the industry’s evolution MovieLabs stands as a beacon for collaboration for a future that honors the past while embracing innovation. “It is essential to continue to embrace emerging technologies in ways that empower storytellers and the entire creative community,” Silverman says. “While much work lies ahead, we are gathering the right companies and voices to realize the 2030 Vision future that has inspired so many.” James Crossland, EVP, Head of Global Content Operations at Warner Bros. Discovery, concludes, “We’ve got a huge change management challenge in front of us, but if there is a through line, we will find it in the MovieLabs Industry Forum. We will do our part to continue the mission to apply the 2030 Vision and as we find more and more use cases you will see an accelerating groundswell of adoption.”

 

Hanging by a Wire: Nail-biting documentary delicately balances archive with fresh footage

 my interview and words written for RED

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The life and death rescue of a group of boys and two adults set against the ticking clock of a single frayed cable is the subject of a hair-raising feature documentary premiering at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.

Hanging by a Wire is the edge-of-the-seat account of a true-life incident from 2023 beginning when the teenagers began their routine journey to school by cable car across a mountain pass in northwestern Pakistan. When two of the system’s cables snapped, the passengers were left in mortal danger nearly one mile above the ground and with time running out before their lifeline of a third cable would give way.

Multi-Emmy-nominated Pakistani filmmaker Mo Naqvi (The Accused: Damned or Devoted; Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror) and producer Bilal Sami (David Blaine – Do Not Attempt) conceived Hanging by a Wire as a real-time thriller built from footage shot moment-by-moment as it unfolded. The hours and hours of growing tension and multiple failed rescue attempts were captured from inside the cable car on the boys’ phones, from drones, a military helicopter, and from the crowd below.

“I was immediately hooked by Mo’s vision,” recalls cinematographer Brendan McGinty (Secrets of the Neanderthals; Welcome to Earth) who was invited by Naqvi to shoot the film. “The archive footage of the event was mind-blowing, a group of schoolboys hanging a mile high from a damaged cable car in the remote mountain region of Battagram in Pakistan. We all understood from the get-go that we needed to hold true to the inherent drama of this real situation, and that we wanted to meet this documentary reality with all of the cinematic flair of a Hollywood action thriller.”

Their visual approach was based in part on their cinematic aspirations for the film, largely founded on the incredible archive footage of the event, but also on the wealth of rich recce material of the region and of the real-life key protagonists. There followed two shoots in 2025, one more documentary-focused at the start of the year and a second more dramatic-focused towards the end.

“The daytime sequences come almost entirely from what people filmed on their phones,” McGinty explains. “Our own shooting focused on interviews and observational material—traditional documentary work—used to understand the characters and their relationships.

“But the most extraordinary part of the rescue happens at night, and there is almost no footage of it. Phones stop working. There is no light. Yet the rescue unfolds over many terrifying stages, nearly failing multiple times, with lives repeatedly at risk. The challenge then becomes an ethical one: how do you tell this story truthfully without inventing anything?”

The solution they arrived at was to involve the real protagonists in the retelling. The boys in the cable car and the rescuers shared authorship of their own story. They physically reenacted what happened, placing themselves in a replica of the cable car (all under studio-safe conditions) guiding the filmmakers through each moment.

“Nothing was scripted. They weren’t performing lines; they were remembering. That level of truth made the work extraordinarily difficult but also incredibly powerful. As a cinematographer, shooting drama under those constraints—where reality is the benchmark and ethics are paramount—is far harder than shooting fiction. You are constantly checking yourself against the truth of what happened.”

From inception, an IMAX presentation was part of the discussion. It was one of several reasons why McGinty selected RED V-RAPTOR for the production.

“To be honest, I don't think there was any other choice for me. The documentaries I’ve seen in IMAX have been wonderful immersive experiences and our story would be perfect for this. The minute those discussions began I'm thinking about protecting the resolution.”

Importance of Optical Low-Pass Filters

He elaborates, “Shooting more resolution than you actually need is always the way I would want to go. Shooting 8K on the V-RAPTOR for a 4K finish means you could reframe and push in to the image but because the resolution is so high you don't need false detail.

“A lot of lower-end cameras which barely reach 4K employ automatic sharpening techniques so the picture bristles with more detail than is actually there. It's false detail. When you're shooting 8K you really don't need any of that. Shooting 8K with RED feels very much like how my eye sees the world. It's a very soft, naturalistic rendition of texture.”

Texture is important to McGinty who shot this film in very high contrast environments. “There are brittle trees and bushes in hard light and shadows. You end up with footage that really tests the fine detail. If your camera doesn’t have Optical Low-Pass Filters (OLPFs) it can produce false, high-frequency detail, which is actually a bit of a nightmare to manage in post. You can end up with these very shimmering images where you’re not looking at real detail but at a computer's version of what detail might look like.”

Protecting the digital negative

McGinty began his career nearly 30 years ago shooting shorts and independent features on film which is why he prefers to shoot raw. “It’s very important to me that I protect the digital negative. Raw is the only way to shoot digital and among high-end cine cameras RED owns compressed raw.”

However, shooting uncompressed raw for docu-style footage is hardly practical, especially at 8K and in a remote region. “You would record terabytes and terabytes of data,” he says. “The files are too big for field work. So, one of the real geniuses of RED from the beginning is REDCODE RAW. I want a raw image to go back to which always protects and holds highlights and where I know there's more in the shadows. So, shooting on location in high contrast situations and in low light with R3D was a big deal for me.”

McGinty shot a lot of handheld and appreciates the ergonomics of the camera. “V-RAPTOR does everything I need it to do in a very simple way. It has very high frame rates if I need them. It has a very simple interface which is ideal for documentary work. You don't want a camera with infinite complexity and menus. You just want something to help you be responsive to a situation.”

Majesty of Vista Vision

The final reason behind his choice was V-RAPTOR’s VV sensor which frames for an aspect ratio of 17:9. “We’re in this exquisite mountainous region of North Pakistan, a mountain climbing Mecca, so I knew that to capture some of that monumentality and majesty I wanted to be shooting VistaVision. Also, in terms of telling our story I felt the absolute heroism of everyone concerned. These are real heroes, people who will step into danger to save the lives of others. I thought an appropriate canvas for us to work on would be large format VistaVision. The RAPTOR just ticked all those boxes for me.”

He paired the V-RAPTOR with Angenieux EZ zooms 22-60mm and 45-135mm occasionally dipping into some macro and fast aperture prime options. “I particularly like the close focus on the EZs and at the 135mm end of the lens this produces very intimate moments and details. With these on the V-RAPTOR we could move from the wide-angle majesty of the rugged Pakistani mountain landscapes to the close-up detail of an eye, without losing the moment to a lens change.”

For stabilized work, McGinty used the DJI Ronin 4D 8K, specifically because it includes an OLPF. This was fitted with a cine-vised set of Nikon Nikkor AIS primes. They also used GoPros, drones and some Sony cameras, including FX3s and FX6s, mostly for second-unit work.

He was aided by AC and long-time collaborator Charlie Perera and Taseer Ali who operated B-camera on the first shoot.

Pushing the picture in post

McGinty’s camera choice was further vindicated in post at Molinare, London working with colorist Jake Davies where he found he was able to push the RED raw files further than he thought possible.

“I would happily shoot 2000 ISO on V-RAPTOR, maybe 3200, and know that I'm still going to have a comfortable picture with not too much noise but what was interesting in the grade is how much noise there was in both the 4D footage and a lot of the Sony footage.

“Jake and I found we were able to regularly push the RED to higher ISOs than I was getting on the Sony and the 4D with—importantly—less noise. The moment we began to push the pictures to try to lift the 4D footage we couldn't. It was pretty maxed out on that. I was shooting 3200 ISO to ProRes raw on the 4D on some of the night stuff but the picture fell apart quite rapidly. There wasn't anywhere near as much there as there was in the R3D files.

“What shooting RED raw means when you’re shooting in low light is the lack of noise in highlights and shadows and the ability to push the picture way beyond my exposure on the day while still not falling apart. Our ability to grade the R3D footage was head and shoulders above any of the other camera formats that were in there.”

He and Davies explored film emulation and lens emulation ideas as a way to tie the footage together. “There is a vast archive at the heart of the film, along with second-unit work and extensive RED material. A unifying aesthetic, such as film emulation, offers an effective way to bring it all together.”

Editor William Grayburn meticulously reconstructed the timeline from multilingual interviews, archive, and new footage. That process revealed gaps in the visual storytelling, which guided the second production shoot. “Without that editorial clarity, the film simply wouldn’t exist in its current form,” McGinty says.

“Hand on heart, this is a phenomenal film. It’s gripping, emotionally honest, and visually powerful. It has the pull of a thriller but the integrity of a documentary. I’m incredibly proud to have been part of it.”

The documentary is produced by Naqvi alongside EverWonder Studio and Mindhouse Productions and premieres in Park City, Utah, on January 22.