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Blackmagic Design announced that URSA EF and Blackmagic Production Camera 4K were used to shoot the popular TV drama series “tenai Keikan. Production of the show is also based around a number of Blackmagic Design products, and is graded using DaVinci Resolve.

Takahiro Imai, the DoP of this series, used URSA as the A Camera and Blackmagic Production Camera 4K as the B Camera. “In my past, I have primarily shot with film cameras. This show is the first time that we have used the URSA as the A camera. Most of the scenes were shot with the URSA, with narrow shots needing a smaller camera as the only shots not done on the URSA. For these we used the Production Camera 4K. The shoots went very smoothly and the URSA has a great sense of stability like film cameras.”

Imai continued: “Usually, the sound of a camera’s fan would be a problem when using similar sized cameras. However, since URSA adapted a water-cooling system, the operational sound was very quiet so that the shooting team gave it very high praise.”

Blackmagic URSA Viewfinder was attached to the URSA and used for this series. “Since I have a lot of experience in film shooting, I am used to creating scenes looking through a viewfinder. Therefore, to find a camera with a high quality viewfinder is one of the most important elements. Clipping highlights and crushing shadows can be easily caused if you were using a low quality viewfinder, making it hard to see the right color and brightness. However, the Blackmagic Viewfinder has no color bleeding and no further delay from the camera. It’s quite amazing that you can get the Blackmagic Viewfinder at this price.”

The show also uses Blackmagic Design’s SmartView 4K monitors for on set monitoring and DaVinci Resolve Studio for color correction.

“We used the SmartView 4K for monitor checking on set,” Imai continued. “I used it by switching two ways; one with the LUT on and the other keeping it as log. SmartView 4K is affordable and its battery drive is supported by 12V, so it worked as the ideal solution for shooting.”

The show, which is shot in RAW, is graded at Tokyo’s Interceptor Inc production/post production house.

“Even though the file size could be large, we decided to shoot all the scenes in RAW because it allowed us to get the perfect image that we wanted. During the test footage, we created the comparison of RAW and RAW 3:1. No one could tell the difference, so we decided to shoot in RAW 3:1. It’s great that we could save up the data while keeping the quality we wanted,” said Imai.

Genta Tamaki from Interceptor Inc., who is in charge of grading the show, explained: “People definitely have a tendency to expect high contrasted hard-boiled images for a police TV drama. You do actually get a hard-boiled kind of impression at the first look, but this story is not a typical so-called morality play, with the hero running to solve crime incidents. Therefore, I got a specific request from Mr. Imai to draw a line from those typical images and make it unique, using different color tone. For that reason, I reduced saturation to lower the contrast on purpose.”

Tamaki continued. “For flashback scenes, I boosted up the saturation. The footage shot with the Blackmagic camera can keep all the colors remaining at the same levels, even when raising the saturation quite high. With other cameras, sometimes it could affect red too much and could fall apart. But with Blackmagic cameras, you get to shoot very flat footage without those problems, so it’s very handy. Even when I lowered saturation to make it look like black and white footage, I was not worried that some colors could be still left in gradation. How it fades its color was just impressively beautiful.”

Imai added, “A very useful aspect of shooting with URSA is that it has the monitor and the setting screen on the right side as well, so that both my assistant and I could check and operate. I felt that the design of the camera is more like a film camera, so it was very easy for me to use. Not just only the camera, but all the other peripheral equipment was affordable, so it was great that we could manage to shoot RAW even with the limited budget.”

Press Photography

Product photos of the URSA EF, Production Camera 4K, SmartView 4K, URSA Viewfinder, DaVinci Resolve and all other Blackmagic Design products, are available at www.blackmagicdesign.com/press/images.

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.

Professional Digital Signage display featuring Android-based OpenPort platform. The display features IPS/Edge LED panel with 16:9, 1920 x 1080 resolution. Bright (500 cd/m?) and high contrast (1300:1, dynamic contrast ratio 50000:1) screen features a response time 8 ms (G to G), Cortex-A9 1.0 GHz (Quad) CPU, 1 GB of memory and 8 GB storage space (USB drives and microSD cards can also be used to expand the 8 GB internal memory storage). Built-in 20 W (10 + 10W) speakers as well as Component/RGB/HDMI/DVI-D video inputs, Serial I/O (RS-232C), microSD card slot, and LAN/W-LAN (IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n) complete the extensive feature set. Compatible with Scala Enterprise 11.01 and newer versions!

Scala Inc., global provider of digital signage solutions, announced the release of Scala Enterprise 11.01. This update has 16 new features and 149 enhancements, focusing on the speed and performance of cyclic processes in Scala Enterprise Content Manager, enhanced template design and control in Scala Enterprise Designer and new Scala Player certifications and optimized playback. Scala's digital signage solutions drive more than 500,000 screens worldwide, connecting networks of digital devices to deliver engaging audience experiences.

Scala Enterprise Designer updates give greater creative design and content control for the template designer. Through the enhanced Script Properties dialog, designers can predetermine the selections a user can make, including fixed media sets, pre-filtered lists, default images and language labels, improving users’ overall experience.

Updates to Scala Enterprise Content Manager focus on improved cyclic processes, streamlining the execution of plan generation and plan sealing. APIs have been extended and performance has been improved, now notably faster for larger database changes. Complementing enhancements in Designer, messaging and workgroups have been streamlined and tightened, ensuring users are only viewing relevant information and accessible assets.

PC Player updates feature increased performance for playback, video and HTML5 (Chromium Embedded Framework updated to 47). Additionally, new players have been certified including the high-performance System on Chip Android-based Panasonic AF1 Series, a range of Android-based IAdea players and Scala Enterprise Player for Chrome have been certified.

Also of note is newly added support for video transparency by adding Apple ProRes AP4H video and streaming video via h.265.

The new DaVinci Resolve 12.5 Studio Public Beta 3 includes improvements for point tracking, lens blur performance and strength range, better render cache playback performance on projects with large media pools, as well as general performance and stability improvements. The Studio edition requires a dongle. For users of DeckLink SDI 4K, blackmagic Design also released a Desktop Video 10.6.6 update. It adds support for keying in 1080p50, 1080p59.94 and 1080p60, as well as support for 3G-SDI Level A in 1080p23.93 to 1080p30. The update also provides a bug fix for audio playback compatibility for some monitors when using DeckLink SDI 4K.

We would be happy to see you at our Roadshow 2016 on Tuesday 24.5. We will see you at Železničná 23 from 10:00 and in addition to the all-day exhibition of profi equipment we have preparedthe below program(so you won't be too bored with us :-).