What Working at 16x16K Taught Us About Film and Television Production

A single frame contains roughly 268 million pixels, wrapped around a spherical surface the size of a city block. Nothing about it behaves like a conventional screen.

When you’re building content for that environment, every part of your pipeline has to hold up. There’s no hiding behind a smaller frame, no approximating. The pixels need to be exactly right, at extraordinary scale, on time.

Our team has worked at that scale. And honestly, it changed how we think about every production that comes through our door. Here’s what we learned.

Why most studios can’t do it

The challenge with large-format content isn’t just resolution. It’s workflow. At 16x16K, the volume of data in a single frame is enormous. Placing elements, conforming to spec, and iterating on creative decisions at that scale requires a pipeline that’s fast, integrated, and genuinely reliable under pressure.

Most VFX studios build their workflows around film and TV demands, which are significant in their own right. But those workflows weren’t designed for Sphere®-scale complexity. Resolution is only part of the picture. The bigger challenge is that we’re not working on a standard flat monitor like every other production.

Sphere® is a spherical canvas, which means coordinate spaces, mappings, lens shaders, and n-display configurations all have to be rebuilt from the ground up. None of the assumptions a film and TV pipeline relies on hold true. When you try to stretch a conventional workflow into that territory, you hit bottlenecks fast. Iteration slows down, revision cycles blow out, and the creative breathing room that directors and supervisors need starts to disappear.

The pipeline behind it

For us at Cause and FX, a few things make this possible, but the most significant is how deeply we’ve integrated Unreal Engine to Houdini into our pipeline. The integration itself uses approaches that are publicly available, largely through USD, but we’re one of the few studios that has taken the time to adopt and refine it properly.

That investment lets our team move assets and scene data between the two platforms in a way that significantly speeds up conforming and placement. It’s the kind of pipeline depth that takes years to build and refine, and one of the reasons Sphere®-scale work is achievable for us in New Zealand.

What it means for film and television

Here’s the part we think matters most. The same pipeline we use for Sphere® is what we bring to every film and TV production.

The infrastructure doesn’t change based on the format. What changes is the headroom. When your pipeline is built for 16x16K, approaching a 4K drama or a streaming action series feels different. There’s more margin between what the tools can handle and what the production demands. That margin shows up as creative flexibility, faster iteration, and fewer late-schedule surprises.

We’re not promising nothing will ever go wrong – VFX production is complex and it doesn’t always go to plan. But when things do get complicated, we’re equipped to respond. That’s what our production partners mean when they talk about working with us: calm, predictable execution, even when the work is genuinely hard.

The productions that show it

Twisted Metal for Sony Pictures Television is probably our clearest example. We served as primary vendor across both seasons, delivering over 900 shots for a production that needed consistent, high-quality VFX at pace. Primary vendor work means you don’t just execute – you carry the schedule, communicate proactively, and solve problems as they come. You can only do that reliably when your pipeline holds up.

Chief of War for Apple TV+ tells a slightly different story. It’s a production we’re proud of not just for what made it to screen, but for how we worked together. We got involved early, collaborated on creative decisions, and helped shape solutions before problems had a chance to compound. That early-stage involvement is where we do our best work.

Both productions reflect something our closest partners already know: we add value well before a single shot is rendered.

The New Zealand advantage

If you’re an international production weighing up where to place your VFX work, there’s a commercial dimension worth knowing about.

New Zealand’s Post, Digital and Visual Effects rebate offers a 25% cash rebate on qualifying expenditure for productions completing eligible PDV work here.

We can act as a Special Purpose Vehicle to help international production’s structure their engagement and access the rebate. It’s a real financial incentive, and it comes up early in most of our BD conversations for good reason.

Put that alongside a studio with tier-one production credentials and a pipeline that’s genuinely singular in this market, and the case for Cause and FX in New Zealand starts to look pretty straightforward.

Getting in early

If there’s a theme running through everything above, it’s timing. The work we’re most proud of happens when we’re brought in before the problems are locked in. Early involvement means we can contribute to creative decisions, help shape the scope of work, and build a workflow around what the production actually needs.

The industry default is reactive: a brief arrives, the work gets scoped, execution begins. We prefer a different model. We push to get involved earlier, and to show up as a creative partner rather than a vendor ticking boxes.

If that sounds like the kind of relationship your production needs, we’d genuinely love to chat.

Get in touch

Our team is based in Auckland, New Zealand. We’re the country’s largest independent VFX studio, working with tier-one international productions across Apple, Netflix, Amazon, Sony, Disney, and Paramount.

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