Add another name to the roster of VR camera companies: Finland’s Nokia is making a VR camera, the Ozo. It’s sleek, it addresses some major pain points in VR production, and it’s made by a former manufacturer of feature phones and paper products. And no, it’s not a consumer camera: this thing is being built with professionals in mind.
The camera was unveiled at an industry event in Los Angeles tonight, and Will had the pleasure of watching a few different clips — a news piece, a music video, and cinematic narrative (a comedy scene at a wedding, so it’s not cinema I’d watch, but still). It’s clear Nokia is aiming this camera at a lot of different verticals in the professional market, which an interesting departure: traditional video is served by a large array of cameras with different features and price points.
But it doesn’t sound like a compromise, because the needs of live action VR shooting are pretty particular. And some of the features that are necessary for, say, VR journalism turn out to be pretty necessary for cinematic VR production. For example, the system can do a quick on-the-fly stitch, which is essential for run-and-gun VR production. (Okay, it’s been described to me as more of a ‘quick fade between cameras’, but we can call it a stitch.) The Ozo can also deliver that quick-stitched view on playback after minimal processing, though not at full quality. If you have the time and budget, the camera retains the raw footage so you can hand-stitch the content for better results.
In addition to the quick-stitch view, the Ozo supports live monitoring. This dual ability to monitor in the field is absolutely, completely essential… and also lacking in most live action VR production, at least for the full-sphere view. Likewise, the Ozo has a single, unified battery and storage, so the crew is not dealing with 16 different chargers and microSD cards on set, a power- and data-wrangling nightmare. That’s the ‘tail’ jutting out of the the back of the rig.
So yeah, you can shoot professional content, see what you’re getting, and you can move the footage around without juggling dozens of drives. (“No, cards with dark-blue tape are for camera 7, that’s the left eye pointed 60 degrees right, and that card has a checkmark so it hasn’t been backed up yet….”) But there are also some downsides — it tops out at 30 frames per second, which is definitely lower than ideal for VR presence. Pricing is TBD, but it should be in the five figures, which is unaffordable for many (but a typical price point for digital cinema gear, for what it’s worth).