From the Inside – A different view of the Cathedral in Poznań

May 2018, Poznań, Poland

Introduction

In May 2018 the PSNC team shot 8K footage of the Cathedral in Poznań. The filming took a few days and was preceded by scanning the building in 3D with the use of LIDAR technology. The technology enabled a very accurate mapping of the main Gothic nave and the Golden Chapel. The footage can be divided into three parts: the interiors, the external surroundings, the aerial photos (which were taken in 6K, as the 8K camera was too heavy to allow the drone to take off) and 360° videos. In addition to that, binaural and ambisonic audio was recorded during a short organ concert performed especially for us in the Cathedral. The source material will be used to contribute to several tasks of the Immersify project related to high quality content, interactive content, immersive sound as well as encoding 16K and VR. By scanning point clouds, we will be able to render movies up to a resolution of 8K (i.e. 16K) and stereoscopic films. So far, two film clips have been produced: 8K from SONY cameras and 16K from point clouds. The recordings were intended not only to acquire high resolution content, but also to provide an interactive immersive experience using software from Immersify and Immersia TV, as well as PSNC’s original solutions.

Story

The experimental recording was aimed not only at capturing a high-resolution video content, but also at combining solutions developed within the ImmersiaTV and Immersify projects. The ImmersiaTV project (www.immersiatv.eu), carried out by an international consortium between 2015 and 2018, focused on synchronising multiple video streams to deliver traditional TV and additional 360° omnidirectional content. We implemented specific extensions for Media Player 8K to synchronise and secure interaction between the Immersify and ImmersiaTV.

There was a whole variety of technologies used in this project – from SONY’s 8K cameras, through drone and aerial photography, to FARO Focus 3D X330 laser scanner. The scanner’s range is from 0.6 – to 330 meters even in direct sunlight. With its integrated GPS receiver, the laser scanner can correlate individual scans in post-processing. It measures up to 976 000 points per second and has an integrated 165-million-pixel colour camera. The 3D laser scanning allowed us to generate point cloud of almost 2 billion points and generate videos in almost any resolution and aspect ratio (8K, 12K, 16K, 3D and 360° panoramas).

Thanks to the courtesy of the Archdiocese of Poznań, our team could install themselves in the church for a week with a group of young actors – four children, who visited the cathedral with a guide, performed as actors.

For Immersify, we have generated several video content – one with nice views from the church (8K camera) and other rendered from point cloud. In order to render 16K, 360°, and stereo content from point cloud, PSNC has used and implemented several improvements to the CloudCompare open source software, especially related to enabling 8K+ resolution rendering, support for 3D and 360 cubic-projection as well as virtual camera tracking using Bézier curves. In addition, the multi-channel, ambisonic and binaural sound was recorded and music was prepared and played using old cathedral organs by Jacek Pupka, who performed masterpieces: Alec Rowley’s ”Triumph song”, J. S. Bach’s Fuge in d-minor and own improvisation.

Making-of

Information