International. Sphere Entertainment and Hitachi Vantara explained how the two companies leverage Hitachi Vantara's data processing software to help power the immersive, high-resolution content of the LED displays in Sphere, both on the 160,000-square-foot indoor LED display and the 580,000-square-foot fully programmable LED outdoor display.
"Sphere is home to many firsts, one of which is streaming immersive, high-resolution video content on a scale never seen before," said Alex Luthwaite, senior vice president of entertainment systems technology at Sphere Entertainment. "Hitachi Vantara worked with our team to develop a fast, reliable and efficient solution. Through their expertise and technology, Sphere's displays deliver content that captivates audiences not only at the Las Vegas venue, but also around the world on social media."
With the world's highest-resolution LED display inside the venue and the largest LED display outside, Sphere leaned on Hitachi Vantara to deliver solutions to stream video content at an unprecedented range. For its original immersive film, Darren Aronofsky's Postcard from Earth, the system handles more than 400 gigabytes per second of throughput with less than 5 milliseconds of latency and a 12-bit color display with a subsampling of 444. Hitachi Vantara used its Hitachi Content Software for File storage platform, a distributed, software-defined, high-performance parallel file system storage solution.
"Sphere represents a new, completely immersive and visually powerful entertainment experience," added Octavian Tanase, chief product officer, Hitachi Vantara. "To ensure that the technology behind this was ready to meet the challenge, Hitachi Vantara worked closely with the Sphere team to test, measure and improve the way data is processed, transmitted and projected. Quality, resolution and color are second to none, and this project has exceeded our already high expectations."
Hitachi's content software for the file system consists of 27 nodes, with 4PB of flash storage for playback within the Sphere and real-time streaming to 7thSense media servers, each streaming 4K video at 60 frames per second, a world first in terms of technology and capacity at this scale. Hitachi Vantara's technology enables Sphere to deliver extremely low latency and high throughput, creating an unforgettable experience for audiences during Postcard from Earth.
Hitachi Vantara also partnered with Sphere to produce the same reliable capabilities at Sphere Studios' Big Dome, a 28,000-square-foot, 100-foot-tall custom geodesic dome in Burbank, CA, with a quarter-sized version of the screen at Sphere in Las Vegas. Vegas. Big Dome serves as a specialized screening, production, and laboratory center for the Sphere Studios team to develop original content exclusively for Sphere.
