News

November 1, 2013

Blackmagic Design announced that record breaking vocal duo Def Tech’s music video for “Marathon” was graded with DaVinci Resolve. The video for the song is one of Japan’s first Ultra HD in 60p music videos and was color corrected and finished at Tokyo based post production house IMAGICA.

Def Tech is a vocal duo that sold more than 2 million of their debut album as an indie artist and have continued to be one of Japan’s most popular musical groups. “Marathon” is included on their latest album, “24/7.” Def Tech teamed up with IMAGICA to create a high quality music video in Ultra HD 60p that showed the duo singing in a dark environment with strong lighting and various weather effects.

IMAGICA is one of Japan's leading production companies and offers shooting, computer graphics and post production services for all types of visual work. The “Marathon” music video was produced to promote Ultra HD in Japan, as well as the duo’s song itself, and was first shown on an 84 inch Ultra HD monitor at Production Expo 2013 held in Tokyo.

For “Marathon”, the production team used ONSET DOCK, a mobile on set grading system designed by IMAGICA and based around DaVinci Resolve. ONSET DOCK allows a director or cinematographer to create the basic look and feel of a video and then allows the them to check footage against base color schemes created with DaVinci Resolve.

“The director for the music video requested we give it a cool, edgy look,” said Asako Harada, colorist, Data Imaging Team, TV Commercial Production Unit at IMAGICA. “I aimed to show off Def Tech’s faces when they are singing to bring out their charm. With Resolve, I could pull out the details of the high quality images, such as the facial expressions when they are singing and the clouds in the background, while I darkened the black for more contrast.”

The video shoot took place outside with the duo standing in strong lighting and artificial rain, while professional athletes and performers, such as skateboarders and break dancers, performed around them. The performance captured by the 4K cameras and the bluish contrasty look developed in Resolve gave a dynamic image to the music video.

Even though the director changed some shots in the timeline during the grading session, grading took around six hours. “Resolve was very responsive when using the control surface, so it really didn’t matter if I was grading in high resolution images. Rendering was a lot faster than I have expected.”

“One of the unique challenges of this video was the very strong lighting. Initially, I was boosting the level to add more contrast, but then the highlight level of the lighting inverted. But I fixed the problem quickly in Resolve using a tone curve. Resolve has a wide variety of tools I can pick and use so that I can cope well with any problems that come at me like this,” Harada continued. “This music video does not have many colors; however I did not want to give it just a simple monochrome tone. I wanted to show many emotions in the video, so I made many versions to show my client and was able to give the director the exact look he was looking for.”

Kenjiro Yamada of the Data Imaging Team, TV Commercial Production Unit at IMAGICA, said, “With Ultra HD, it is very time consuming and complex work in terms of data management. Ultra HD in 60P is 10 times more data than regular HD 24P material. It takes an immense amount of time to just move data between drives. So initially, we used DaVinci Resolve to make Quick Time files for offline from RAW camera footage. This was a huge advantage for us, since after the conversion and making backups, the rest of the workflow is the same because we use proxies for offline editing.“

He continued, “There are so many types of video formats, and we are expected to handle everything. Resolve helps us because it supports a wide variety of files and codecs, and also it always adds support for new formats as very quickly.”

About DaVinci Resolve

Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve is the world’s highest performance on set, editing and color correction solution for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux computers. DaVinci Resolve supports more real time color correction than any other system because it’s not limited by the performance of the computer it’s running on. DaVinci Resolve eliminates this performance barrier because it’s based on a cluster of high performance GPU cards, so all processing is always real time. DaVinci Resolve has the power of a true real time performance solution so handles complex color grades even when using dozens of primaries, secondaries, Power Windows™, multi point tracking, blurs, and more. DaVinci Resolve provides incredible performance in a low cost solution which can be easily upgraded by adding extra GPUs for supercomputer power to handle 4K resolutions, stereoscopic 3D and real time grading direct from raw camera files such as ARRI RAW, RED RAW and Sony RAW files which can be handled with ease.

Press Photography

Product photos of DaVinci Resolve 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 film restoration software for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries. Blackmagic Design’s DeckLink capture cards launched a revolution in quality and affordability, 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 stereoscopic 3D and 4K workflows. Founded by world leading post production editors and engineers, Blackmagic Design has offices in the USA, United Kingdom, Japan, Singapore, and Australia. For more information, please check www.blackmagicdesign.com.

Adobe announced the immediate availability of major new updates to the video apps in Adobe Creative Cloud, including new capabilities in Adobe Premiere Pro CC, Adobe After Effects CC, Adobe SpeedGrade CC, Adobe Prelude CC, Adobe Media Encoder CC and Adobe Story CC Plus. The updates include a direct link color pipeline between Adobe Premiere Pro CC and Adobe SpeedGrade CC, expanded native support for 4K high frame rate content, a new mask tracker in Adobe After Effects, the Adobe Prelude CC Live Logger iPad app and many other feature enhancements.

October 31, 2013

Blackmagic Design announced a new model of UltraStudio 4K, the world's first video solution to include super fast Thunderbolt 2 technology. The new UltraStudio 4K replaces the previous model and is available now for only 755 EUR.

The award winning UltraStudio 4K, is an attractively designed rack mount capture and playback device based on Thunderbolt 2 technology developed by Intel®. Featuring a machined aluminum front panel with an integrated color LCD as well as fast to use video and audio input buttons. UltraStudio 4K is attractive so it’s perfect for desktop as well as rack mount use. The rear panel includes virtually every type of video and audio connection that exists including 6G-SDI, HDMI 4K, analog component/s-video/composite, as well as balanced analog and AES/EBU digital audio. That means customers can connect to all decks, cameras, monitors and more.

Now with the incredible 20 Gb/s speed of Thunderbolt 2, UltraStudio 4K has even more bandwidth to work with higher quality video and frame rates. Now customers will be able to capture and playback Ultra HD 4K YUV video at 60 frames per second and Ultra HD 4K RGB video at 30 frames per second via the advanced 6G-SDI video connections. The Thunderbolt loop thru allows connection of up to 6 devices, so customers can connect fast disk arrays for massive amounts of video storage with a single Thunderbolt connection to their computer.

UltraStudio 4K handles virtually every television format, featuring 6G-SDI connections that instantly switch between SD, HD, Ultra HD and 4K making it the ideal solution for all post production and broadcast users when working on design, editing, paint, color correction and visual effects tasks. UltraStudio 4K is also perfect for 3D workflow as it features both interleaved/side by side and dual stream capture and playback. Interleaved 3D allows the left and right eye to be interleaved as fields into a single video connection and file, so customers can edit using current editing software.

UltraStudio 4K customers will be able to take advantage of the forthcoming Desktop Video 10 release. The new Desktop Video 10 driver architecture is a major new software update designed from the ground up to be optimized for high speed computers and the new emerging Ultra HD television formats that require massive data speeds. DaVinci Resolve 10 customers will benefit from the simultaneous capture and playback support that lets them capture direct from cameras on set and grade the live video with multiple nodes of color correction for live onset monitoring. This makes lighting a film set easy and allows DOP’s, directors and colorists to work together to optimize the film’s look on set.

"The speed of the new Thunderbolt 2 is mind blowing!" said Grant Petty, CEO, Blackmagic Design. "We are incredibly excited to deliver the worlds first video capture and playback solution that features this amazing technology and includes almost every video and audio connection available! Now with faster more powerful Thunderbolt 2 computers on the way, video professionals will be able to work with multiple streams of 4K and get more layers of realtime effects and color correction than ever before."

UltraStudio 4K Key Features

• Single Link 6G-SDI, Dual Link 3G-SDI connections, supports SD, HD up to1080p60 and 4K DCI.

• Compatible with Mac OS X computers with Thunderbolt™ 2 and Thunderbolt.

• SDI inputs include full SDI re-clocking for capture from poor quality SDI sources.

• HDMI in and out, supports SD and HD formats up to 1080p60, frame packing 3D and 4K.

• Component analog in and out.

• Component analog switches to s-video and composite.

• 2 channel balanced analog audio in and out. Additional RCA HiFi audio in.

• 2 channel AES/EBU unbalanced audio in and out.

• Timecode in and out on XLR connectors

• Genlock/tri-sync input.

• Sony™ compatible RS-422 deck control.

• Supports uncompressed 8/10 bit and compressed video capture and playback.

• Supports Ultra HD and 4K DCI capture and playback using new Single Link 6G-SDI or Dual Link

• 3G-SDI connections and HDMI.

• Capture/playback of side by side, line by line, top and bottom and frame packing 3D via HDMI.

• Capture/playback of side by side, line by line, top and bottom and dual stream 3D via SDI.

• Includes hardware up down and cross conversion on playback.

• Includes hardware SD and HD keying.

• Supports Final Cut Pro X , Avid Media Composer 7® Adobe® Premiere® Pro CC6, Adobe® Photoshop® CC6, Adobe ® After Effects® CC6 , DaVinci Resolve and more.

• Includes free developer SDK.

• Supports free DaVinci Resolve Lite software.

Availability and Price

UltraStudio 4K is available now for 755 EUR ex. VAT.

Press Photography

Product photos of UltraStudio 4K 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 film restoration software for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries. Blackmagic Design’s DeckLink capture cards launched a revolution in quality and affordability, while the company’s DaVinci Emmy™ award winning color correction products have dominated the television and film industry since 1984. Blackmagic Design continues ground breaking innovations including stereoscopic 3D and 4K 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 check www.blackmagicdesign.com.

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FOX Sports is using Sony's F55 professional 4K camera to give television viewers a better look at close plays during the 2013 World Series. For each game, one manned F55 camera is positioned high over first base to cover all three bases and home plate. The camera signals are sent over fiber to the game production truck and put through Sony's BPU-4000 baseband processor unit, allowing FOX Sports to do multiple cut-outs and zooms of 4K images and extract crisp, clear HD images with no pixel degradation. “There’s more flexibility with 4K content,” said Jerry Steinberg, senior vice president, technical operations, of FOX Sports. “You’re starting with such a high-resolution image and more picture information to work with. Our cut-outs and zooms end up in much higher quality and we can really zoom in on a shot and still get a completely clear image.”