News

Press Release

Blackmagic Design announced that Sky News in the UK has implemented Blackmagic's ATEM 2 M/E Production Studio 4K with an ATEM 2 M/E Broadcast Panel and Smart Videohub as part of an overhaul to the news organization's broadcast systems in “Studio D”.

A small team of multi skilled staff use the studio to create three minute news summary, which are then published across Sky News' digital outlets. The studio also has the layout and facilities available so that a bigger gallery set up, with producer, director, vision mixer and sound supervisor, all managed by a technical director, can be deployed on more complicated projects if the need arises.

Creating those news summaries had been very time consuming reveals veteran anchorman Martin Stanford. “This used to be a long edit suite job, marrying presenter video with news footage, adding information straps and so on. With the new studio workflow we can now create a bulletin in real time, mark the in and out, and then post to all digital devices. That has reduced the publication time lag from over an hour to a matter of minutes.”

“Every source, whether it’s station wide or local to the studio, goes through a Smart Videohub router to an assigned channel on the ATEM 2 M/E Production Studio 4K switcher. That includes three of our existing HD studio cameras, which have been repositioned onto the studio floor, as well as all of the monitoring in the gallery and on the studio floor, ensuring maximum flexibility.”

Four pre existing playout channels from the Sky News media server are connected to the switcher, as are three outside source channels, which can be populated by almost any source from the central Sky router, and our local feeds from a Mac computer and Apple TV unit, allowing us to connect devices via airplay.”

The lead project engineer, George Davies, Head of Operations at Sky News, explains they also assigned all three HD camera channels their own keyer. “Each camera has assigned to it an ATEM Television Studio switcher as a keyer. This means we can give the vision mixer access to camera sources with backgrounds already chroma keyed,” he explains. “Interviews and other program elements really are much easier to film against green when you don’t have to worry about cameras and keyed images at the same time!”

“For staff new to gallery operations the Blackmagic workflows we’ve implemented in “Studio D” have been both easy to learn and use, while the broadcast standard architecture and workflows have been easy enough to understand and adapt to for our more skilled operators,” concludes George. “Blackmagic’s ATEM 2 M/E Production Studio 4K offers good levels of functionality for the price, while the broadcast panel, provided us a reassuringly familiar layout for staff.”

Press Photography

Product photos of the ATEM 2 M/E Production Studio 4K, ATEM 2 M/E Broadcast Panel and Smart Videohub 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.

Panasonic has introduced two new interchangeable lenses for its LUMIX G range of Micro Four Thirds System cameras – the H-HS030E, a 30mm macro lens, and the H-HS043E, a 42.5mm portrait lens.

The versatile LUMIX G MACRO 30mm/ F2.8 ASPH. / MEGA O.I.S. (H-HS030E) is ideal for life-size macro shots – such as close-ups of insects, food or flowers - as well as for stunning portrait. The new LUMIX G 42.5mm/F1.7 ASPH./POWER O.I.S. (H-HS043E) enables you to achieve a beautiful bokeh effect with soft, out-of-focus blur, allowing you to add stunning artistry to close-up portraits or shots in low light.

H-HS030 - a versatile F2.8 30mm macro lens

Elegantly designed with a sharp, metallic black finish, the new 30mm macro lens perfectly matches the style of the latest LUMIX G interchangeable lens cameras. With a 30mm (35mm camera equivalent: 60 mm) wide angle and a high speed F2.8 aperture, the lens provides sharp, high contrast image rendering. Utilising 1x life-size magnification, deep depth of field, and a focusing distance starting at just 0.105 m, the lens offers excellent performance even when shooting true-to-life macro shots.

A durable and reliable metal mount means the lens is perfectly suited for day-to-day use, while the multi-coated lens elements minimise ghosting and flaring to further enhance shooting performance. With a 240fpsDrive Auto Focus (AF) and MEGA O.I.S. (Optical Image Stabilizer), you can achieve fast, accurate focusing and stable framing with every shot.

Black, available from May

H-HS043 – a new F1.7 42.5mm portrait lens

The new 42.5mm lens is available in sharp metallic black and silver, and delivers beautiful defocus to help you add more artistry and creativity into your photography. Offering a 42.5mm middle-telephoto focal distance (35mm camera equivalent: 85mm equivalent to 85mm on a 35mm camera), a high speed F1.7 aperture, and a versatile focusing distance of 0.31 m, the lens can deliver portraits with a rich stereoscopic effect as well as close-ups with beautiful defocus.

The lens’ POWER O.I.S. system effectively compensatesunwanted blur caused by handshake - not only small, fast movements but also large, slow ones - helping you get the results you want, even in low light situations. The POWER O.I.S system, alongside the 240fps Drive AF, delivers stable framing and precise focusing every time.

Black & Silver, available from May

Red Giants released Magic Bullet Suite 12, a set of color grading tools which includes new versions of Magic Bullet Looks, Colorista, Mojo and Cosmo, plus the all new Magic Bullet Film. Magic Bullet Suite 12 includes 7 tools, specifically Magic Bullet Looks 3.0, Magic Bullet Colorista III, Magic Bullet Film, Magic Bullet Mojo 2.0, Magic Bullet Cosmo 2.0, Denoiser II, and LUT Buddy, all compatible with Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects, most supporting Final Cut Pro X, Motion 5, Media Composer, as well as Sony Vegas. Hardware acceleration, streamlined user interfaces, and wider compatibility are the highlights of this new release.

Red Giants released Magic Bullet Suite 12, a set of color grading tools which includes new versions of Magic Bullet Looks, Colorista, Mojo and Cosmo, plus the all new Magic Bullet Film. Magic Bullet Suite 12 includes 7 tools, specifically Magic Bullet Looks 3.0, Magic Bullet Colorista III, Magic Bullet Film, Magic Bullet Mojo 2.0, Magic Bullet Cosmo 2.0, Denoiser II, and LUT Buddy, all compatible with Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects, most supporting Final Cut Pro X, Motion 5, Media Composer , as well as Sony Vegas. Hardware acceleration, streamlined user interfaces, and wider compatibility are the highlights of this new release.

Press Release

Blackmagic Design announced that Fusion Studio was used by VFX house Doc & A Soc to construct some of the most complex visual effects (VFX) in Matthew Vaughn’s latest worldwide cinema release “Kingsman: The Secret Service”.

Gary "Eggsy" Unwin (Taron Egerton) lives in a South London housing estate and seems headed for a life behind bars. However, a suave Harry Hart (Colin Firth) recognizes potential in the youth and and recruits him to the ranks of a British secret spy organisation, known as Kingsman. Two time BAFTA nominated visual effects supervisor John Paul Docherty (“Skyfall”, “The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus” and “The Golden Compass”) worked as a vendor on the comic book adaptation, compositing more than a hundred shots in Fusion Studio.

Docherty worked closely with digital matte painter Jim Bowers to create stunning 360 degree environments for key sequences in the film, including a huge hangar filled with a myriad of aircraft and secret service staff, which is Eggsy’s first glimpse into the true scale of the Kingsman organisation.

“The whole shot was an environment created by matte painter Jim Bowers, and we added in various moving elements, including workmen, a plane being towed and a man arc welding at the back, which is a little throwback to Lost in Space,” reveals John. “There is about ten layers of environment in that shot, and then we ran it through Fusion Studio’s 3D environment. The shot went through an awful lot of changes within Fusion, including re-lighting the whole thing, without needing any additional elements from Jim and then the foregrounds shot was keyed on.”

Compositing for major explosion effects was also carried out in Fusion Studio, with Docherty creating glass shatter effects, together with mattes of building exteriors, which were overlayed on live pyrotechnic footage shot with high speed cameras. “In the explosion sequence we had to deal with four shots filmed with high speed cameras at Levesden on a cold, rainy day. I then had to render this in, together with the glass shattering effects I’d created. We had to deal with multiple image formats and lots of lens distortion, as well as some pretty dramatic color space and resolution differences before we could effectively comp in the office and taxi elements.”

Fusion’s Dimension Optical Flow toolset was also a key element in Docherty’s workflow, particularly when complex respeeding issues had to be overcome. “In one scene we move from the aftermath of an action sequence to a moving taxi with the Kingsman logo flashing on a back seat monitor. This looks like quite a simple shot but the speeds on both sides had been adjusted by the editor, which works really well, however he would throw in cut frames that made the respeeds very complex. Fusion’s Optical Flow did very well handling all of that.”

Conflicting schedules meant that overall visual effects supervisor Steve Begg had to move onto another production, so Docherty was asked to take over as additional visual effects supervisor, splitting the remaining VFX workload with industry legend John Bruno. In this capacity Docherty covered a broad spectrum of shots, ranging from full CG and environmental simulation to cosmetic retouches, fixes and pyro work. “There’s a very long shot where Valentine, played by Samuel L Jackson is revealing his evil plan to Michael Caine’s character, Arthur. The actors were shot on different days with different camera moves and no motion control. The complex workflow involved a load of tracked patches, respeeds and reanimated elements as well as heavy duty color matching. Fusion handled it with ease,” sums up John.

Press Photography

Product photos of Fusion 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.

Adobe Photoshop, the imaging software that continues to redefine creativity in the digital age, turns 25. Photoshop is one of the most recognized software brands in the world with tens of millions of users, and is the go-to application for digital image manipulation across all media: from print, to film, to the Web. How it all began? In 1987, Thomas Knoll developed a pixel imaging program called Display. It was a simple program to showcase grayscale images on a black-and-white monitor. However, after collaborating with his brother, John Knoll, the two began adding features that made it possible to process digital image files. The program eventually caught the attention of industry influencers, and in 1989, Adobe made the decision to license the software, naming it Photoshop and shipping the first version in 1990. “Adobe thought we’d sell about 500 copies of Photoshop a month,” said Thomas Knoll, Adobe Fellow and Photoshop co-creator. “Not in my wildest dreams did we think creatives would embrace the product in the numbers and ways they have.”