When Saturday Night Live celebrated its 50th anniversary, NBCU and Meta tapped Light Sail VR to create a groundbreaking immersive experience. The Los Angeles based studio, co-founded by director Matthew Celia, produced a series of 360° VR videos that gave audiences the chance to step inside Studio 8H and witness the action from a totally unique perspective. The result was an Emmy-winning project that blended SNL’s fast-paced live energy with the cinematic language of VR. Fans could explore the stage, see reactions from the audience, and even catch a glimpse of the crew at work.
Our team spoke with Matthew Celia, Co-Founder and Creative Director of Light Sail VR, who directed the project. He shared insights on the challenges of immersive workflows and how Topaz Video AI helped bring the SNL50th experience to life.
Interview with Matthew Celia
Co-Founder & Creative Director, Light Sail VR
Hi Matt, Congratulations on winning the Emmy. That is amazing!
Thank you! Last night was surreal. Taking home an Emmy for the Outstanding Emerging Media Program is a dream come true and the result of years of hard work and dedication to this unique and amazing craft. It was a true honor to direct the SNL50th: The Anniversary Special Immersive Experience and bring it to life with an incredible team of people!
You’ve been specializing in 360/VR and immersive for a long time. How did you and Light Sail get involved in the project?
NBCU in partnership with Meta approached us with the opportunity to bring several immersive cameras onto the set of Studio 8H during the taping of the show. I, of course, immediately said yes.
Why is upscaling an important process for immersive media workflows?
Resolution is very important in immersive media, as you want to saturate the number of pixels the displays can display. For example, the Meta Quest headsets saturate at just about 8K. The Apple Vision Pro is nearly double that. Due to budget, technology, or use of older media projects, the finished films may not have been mastered at a resolution that takes advantage of those displays. This is where we turn to Video AI's upscaling to help us.
How and why was Video AI used on SNL50th?
In immersive, we’re not able to zoom the camera so finding the perfect spot can sometimes be challenging. On SNL, it’s fairly crowded with the audience, the cast, the crew, and everything else that went into that incredible show. We settled on placing one of our cameras atop one of the broadcast cameras, but the tradeoff was that this camera didn’t capture at a resolution high enough to fit into our post production pipeline.
The cameras captured at 5120x2460 and we wanted to get to 8192x4096. We experimented with several different models and settings. The footage was incredibly challenging because the talent was pretty far away and the lighting was dim. Often, their mouths were only a few pixels! In the end we settled on using a combination of Proteus with some custom settings or Rhea because the denoising and sharpening that model also performs seemed to compress best when we went for the final delivery. It really depended on the scene and the action. That’s why I love the preview function in Video AI!
"For immersive workflows, Topaz is very very good compared to other upscaling solutions!"
How long have you used Video AI in your workflow?
We’ve been using Topaz Video AI at our studio since 2023, when it first started to emerge as a leader in AI video upscaling. We’ve used it to scale up legacy projects as well as on several high-profile works that have been captured with cameras not capable of natively delivering the resolution we want. It’s also been a critical part of our Apple Vision Pro workflow until acquiring the Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive. If you are filming on Canon and want to bring your work to the Vision Pro, Topaz is a must have.
How does Topaz compare to other upscaling solutions?
It’s very very good. We’ve tried other upscaling solutions, but they either introduce terrible artifacts (including a seam line in the back of the 360 image) or don’t do nearly as good of a job bringing back detail. I also like that it tastefully does a good job dealing with noise and sharpening, which helps eliminate additional steps we sometimes have to take. I also think the interface is easy to use and compare different models before spending a ton of compute time testing various settings out.
Experience the Saturday Night Live's 50th Anniversary Special like you've never seen it before!
