Blackmagic Design workflow powers new experience for professional flight training.
Fremont, CA, USA – Wednesday, September 17, 2025 – Blackmagic Design today announced that Rogue Labs is creating an immersive flight training experience for Apple Vision Pro using the Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive digital film camera and latest version of DaVinci Resolve Studio for Mac. The innovative new experience, featuring Apple Immersive content, will be featured in Rogue Labs’ new app for Apple Vision Pro, Flight Sight by Rogue Aviation, which puts viewers directly in the pilot’s seat as they operate Robinson helicopters.
Rogue Labs is an immersive media and spatial app development studio. According to Rogue Labs President Cory Hill, “Our goal for the Flight Sight app on Apple Vision Pro is to create a state of the art tool that enables helicopter students to experience flight training in a way that has not been done before, and the URSA Cine Immersive camera is absolutely the best tool to accomplish that.”
Flight Sight uses a mix of lifelike 3D helicopter models and Apple Immersive Video to put pilots in training in real world scenarios so they can familiarize themselves with maneuvers and procedures without ever leaving the ground. By taking an immersive approach to training, users benefit from enhanced safety while also optimizing their training time and financial resources. The app will also feature 3D helicopter models that provide interactive learning opportunities within an immersive airport environment, spatial Airport Procedure Maps that enable students to visualize their arrival and departure routes, and exhilarating flight experiences for both trainees and those simply seeking to sightsee.
Rogue Labs Senior Product Manager Corey Walter explained, “We’re creating a first of its kind spatial training platform for helicopter pilots, combining the realism of stereoscopic video with the immersive capabilities of Apple Vision Pro. This format enables us to present flight training in a way that feels both physically engaging and instructionally effective. Capturing maneuvers from the pilot’s point of view introduces performance training objectives in an unparalleled way, where the brain registers the event as something the student has done in real life. Research shows that immersive first person video can create a powerful sense of presence and trigger memory systems in the brain, helping learners feel like they’ve ‘already done it once’ before stepping into a real aircraft.”
“We want to put our users right in the pilot’s seat in the most immersive way possible, short of getting in the helicopter itself,” said Rogue Labs Founder Matt Barnes. “While we were previously able to cobble our own solutions together, they were unwieldy both in production and post production. The URSA Cine Immersive is literally the answer to almost every problem we encountered, from the image quality and sharpness to the Resolve driven post production workflow. It’s truly a game changer.”
For the team’s initial shoots, they mounted an URSA Cine Immersive in the helicopter’s pilot seat to capture the perspective of a student receiving training from an instructor during take off, flight and landing. This presented many unique challenges, including how to stabilize the camera in a cramped and vibrating environment. They used the camera in a flight hangar while mounted to a crane and on a tripod to capture footage of an instructor walking around the outside of a helicopter while conducting a preflight check.
“The helicopter shots require a wide 3D field of view of the cockpit so viewers can see everything in the aircraft in detail, including what the instructor is doing with their hands and feet, the changing gauges and the 180 degree world outside the helicopter’s windows. Shooting inside a helicopter is challenging because it is a tight fit,” Barnes explained. “We found that completely eliminating the natural helicopter shake makes it feel fake. However, we can’t have too much shake, or you aren’t able to read the gauges, and people might become sick.”
Walter added, “We’ve been capturing real inflight training missions, everything from basic startup flows to advanced autorotation maneuvers. Shooting in that environment means you’re dealing with vibration, tight quarters, and complex lighting conditions. From a product design and integration perspective, those constraints informed our decision to capture both instructor intent and student perspective in the same shot. The URSA Cine Immersive makes that possible by delivering an incredibly wide, crisp 3D field of view that performs well even in challenging lighting and tight cabin layouts.”
According to Hill, the URSA Cine Immersive’s large 5″ HDR touchscreen and an external color status LCD touchscreen on dual sides of the camera really helps capture content in the tight space. “We love the fact that the camera has monitors and access to its settings on both sides of the camera body, as well as options to attach additional monitors. Viewing immersive footage is always a challenge, and having these multiple vantage points is a huge bonus, especially since we sometimes only have access to one seat on either side of the smaller aircraft. We also love the ease of use of the Blackmagic OS, and we are very excited for the singular pipeline that Resolve will provide for the entire workflow from production to final product,” he said.
John “JR” Racine, Rogue Labs creative and technical director, echoed the sentiments: “The URSA Cine Immersive is very user friendly. The dynamic range of the sensor is helpful for the cockpit shots, where we have a darker interior and a bright exterior. The camera’s resolution and high 90 fps frame rate, as well as the extreme sharpness across the entire lens, makes it our number one choice.”
Ultimately, the Rogue Labs team chose the URSA Cine Immersive and DaVinci Resolve Studio workflow paired with Apple Vision Pro because there is no other solution available that offers the resolution and quality required for this experience.
Barnes explained, “For example, it is vitally important that the gauges can be read when in the cockpit. Only the resolution and quality provided by the combination of the URSA Cine Immersive, DaVinci Resolve and Apple Immersive Video met the strict requirements we set for this project, and, in fact, exceeded our requirements. We are very happy with the tools we have at our disposal, and we feel like we are living in the future.”
“We’re always looking for new ways to make helicopter flight training more approachable and cost effective while increasing safety and knowledge retention. Immersive filmmaking, when done right, connects the viewer to the story in ways simply never possible before. Nothing we’ve come up with previously even begins to compare with what these immersive experiences provide,” Barnes concluded. “Apple Vision Pro offers an incredibly powerful spatial computing experience with exceptional displays. Now with the URSA Cine Immersive, we can truly take advantage of what’s possible through this new medium. The difference in resolution, sharpness, and real immersion is night and day from the other solutions out there.”
Flight Sight will be available on the App Store for Apple Vision Pro this fall. More information about Rogue Aviation, Rogue Labs, and Flight Sight for Apple Vision Pro is available at www.flightsightvr.com/.
About Blackmagic Design
Blackmagic Design creates the world’s highest quality video editing products, digital film cameras, color correctors, video converters, video monitoring, routers, live production switchers, disk recorders, waveform monitors and real time film scanners for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries. Blackmagic Design’s DeckLink capture cards launched a revolution in quality and affordability in post production, while the company’s Emmy™ award winning DaVinci color correction products have dominated the television and film industry since 1984. Blackmagic Design continues ground breaking innovations including 6G-SDI and 12G-SDI products and stereoscopic 3D and Ultra HD workflows. Founded by world leading post production editors and engineers, Blackmagic Design has offices in the USA, UK, Japan, Singapore and Australia. For more information, please go to www.blackmagicdesign.com.