District Cinema

District Cinema is a creative technology studio working in virtual production, reality capture, markerless motion capture and custom Unreal Engine pipelines for film, television, enterprise brands and live events. Puget Systems' case study of the studio names CEO John Makar and Technical Director Nolan Kearney and lists recent work for Apple TV and HBO.

The studio's location work is built on Gaussian splatting. District Cinema captures sites with XGRIDS spatial scanners to produce centimeter accurate digital twins and brings them into Unreal Engine through Volinga's plugin, and it was named as an early adopter when Volinga and XGRIDS formalized that capture to Unreal pipeline in September 2025. John Makar presented the studio's virtual production use of the method on the commercial track of the Radiance Fields session at SIGGRAPH.

In April 2026 District Cinema launched Terra, a browser based 3D viewer for film production. Terra lets producers, directors and location managers scout, block shots with virtual camera lenses and take point to point measurements inside Gaussian splat environments from a desktop browser with no installation. The Terra product page also lists annotations and drawing, bookmarks and snapshots, real time multi user review through shareable links, and rigging and CAD with automatic structure detection. Terra imports splats as PLY, SOG, KSPLAT, SPLAT, SPZ and LCC files and models as USD, glTF, GLB, STL, FBX and OBJ.

Access to Terra runs through a waitlist. The free tier carries limited storage, a Production tier, in beta and listed as coming soon, adds project organization, secure sharing, geolocated mapping and sun pathing, and a Studio Enterprise tier adds enterprise SSO and on premise deployment. PDF script and schedule import, vCam integration, AI relighting with tools such as Beeble and VR headset support were described at launch as upcoming or in testing, and are not shipped features.

Alongside Terra the studio runs a Production Capture Network of vetted scanning professionals. It offers Previs Quality scans for scouting inside Terra, which take 15 to 45 minutes on site with a turnaround of half a day to one day per scan, and Final Pixel Quality digital twins for use as backgrounds on LED volumes and green screen stages.