News

August 27, 2013

Blackmagic Design announced that Blackmagic Cinema Camera and DaVinci Resolve were used to complete FOX Sports 1's premier commercial “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

Launched on August 17, 2013, FOX Sports 1 is America’s new sports network that includes NASCAR, UFC, college football, college basketball and soccer coverage, along with studio shows, such as FOX Football Daily and FOX Sports LIVE.

Directed by HSI Productions’ Joseph Kahn, the commercial called for aerial shots of a NASCAR race, and HSI Productions turned to Mi6 Films, an aerial photography and video company based in Southern California. Because the NASCAR shoot took place at Charlotte Motor Speedway in Charlotte, N.C., Mi6 Films partnered with Beaufort, S.C. based wollwerthfilms to achieve the aerial shots.

Wollwerthfilms specializes in aerial cinematography and provided a high tech RC aerial cinematography rig equipped with a Blackmagic Cinema Camera in order to help capture the intensity of a 200 mph NASCAR race during the first day of shooting at Charlotte Motor Speedway.

“The director, Joseph Kahn, was looking for a really dramatic wipe reveal of the stadium and motor speedway with fans cheering and waving,” said Stephen Wollwerth, owner wollwerthfilms. “We were also able to capture a long straight high speed shot where we cleared the fence and dropped down to just over the track level as cars were passing underneath.”

In order to achieve these shots, Stephen mounted a Blackmagic Cinema Camera on a 3X Pro v3 gimbal from PhotoShip One, which was then mounted on an aerial cinematography rig Stephen built himself. A Blackmagic Design Mini Converter SDI to Analog was also mounted on the helicopter to convert the video feed to analog and send it downlink from the helicopter wirelessly for ground viewing.

“We needed really high video quality to match the other high end cameras that were used for shooting, and the Blackmagic Cinema Camera fit right in,” said Stephen. “The footage was shot in 2.5K CinemaDNG RAW format for optimum image quality, and the 13 stops of dynamic range really gave us the latitude we needed. Even DIT Jeremy Ball commented that the latitude of the footage was amazing.”

Colorist, DIT, Post Supervisor and Owner of A GRADE, a Charlotte, N.C. based post production facility, Jeremy and Bryan Scibelli, of production and post facility Cinemanix, were the DITs for the Charlotte location and used Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve color corrector for setting up look up tables, data management, transcoding and rendering out on set dailies.

“We had a mix of Resolve and Resolve Lite, and we couldn’t have asked for a better organizational tool. Resolve’s ability to add in different types of metadata carried through the post process was invaluable, especially with the multi camera, multi location and multi day shoot,” said Jeremy. “Resolve is affordable, fast and powerful, and provided us with a seamless process when it came to handling the multitudes of footage from a range of cameras. It’s pretty much the only tool out there that handles virtually any type footage. We were there on the first day of shooting, and Resolve set the standard for the entire shoot’s dailies process.”

Press Photography

Product photos of all 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 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.

Blackmagic Design's new rack-based disk reader MultiDock is now in stock!

The new Blackmagic Camera Utility 1.4.1 for Blackmagic Cinema Camera EF/MFT and Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera is now available for download:

New in this update:

• Improved auto focusing performance with Olympus Micro Four Third lenses on Pocket Cinema Camera

• Improved SD card compatibility on Pocket Cinema Camera

• Fixed issue where monitored audio channels in headphones during record is swapped on Pocket Cinema Camera

• Improved RP188 timecode accuracy on Blackmagic Cinema Camera EF and MFT

• Improved notification to user when doing Interval recording

• Support for Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera

 
To access this update, visit the ?Blackmagic Design Support page and select your product.

August 22, 2013

8G Postproduction Workshop, a Shanghai based postproduction company, has colored the first season of the Chinese version of the hit television singing reality show “I Am A Singer” with DaVinci Resolve.

The popular reality show airs on Friday night on Hunan TV, and each episode of “I Am A Singer” is shot on 38 cameras with different settings and various recording formats. Like any other weekly reality show, “I Am A Singer” has a very tight production schedule. The postproduction team had to create a 90 minute program out of 400 hours of footage within 8 days, with less than 20 hours allowed for color grading. 8G Postproduction Workshop deployed three DaVinci Resolves for this project.

The schedule was tight but some processes were time consuming. “Sometimes our colorists had to split the large media files from the editing team into individual shots before color grading. Fortunately, DaVinci Resolve’s automatic scene cut detection feature saved us time,” said Weida Xu, manager and colorist of 8G Postproduction Workshop. “If we got the EDL or XML, we could connect Resolve to the client’s SAN for conforming. Though there were many different formats, Resolve allowed native grading without the need for transcoding.”

Unlike a feature film or commercial shot following a pre written script on a controllable set, a reality show always attempts to record what really happens, even under poor conditions, which tends to result in shots with incorrect white balance or color casts. These problems had to be fixed in Resolve shot by shot. “Resolve’s real time processing ensures our efficiency,” said Xu. “Besides global color correction, we were also able to use many efficient secondary tools in Resolve for color corrections within a limited area. For example, we might need to track a person moving fast from point A to B. With Resolve’s automatic tracking feature, all we had to do is select the object, create the key frames and Resolve will automatically finish the rest of a very complicated tracking, which allowed us to further improve our production value within limited time.”

When they were done with color grading, the colorists also needed to check if there were any shots neglected. “DaVinci Resolve has a ‘Timeline Management’ functionality that helped us spot uncolored shots out of thousands of shots, perfect for TV shows with a number of shots or long form projects,” said Xu.

“Most colorists enter the field by learning Resolve because it perfectly matches colorists’ thinking. Its YRGB processing is a good example, which allows the colorist to precisely control blacks, midtones and highlights. Plus, DaVinci Resolve’s node based processing is more intuitive and allows you to master it easily,” added Xu.

Press Photography

Product photos of all 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 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 has released an update for Premiere Pro CS6, previous generation of its acclaimed non-linear video editor. The 6.0.4 update provides a number of important fixes addressing AVCHD clip spanning and the warp stabilizer. Adobe recommend all users install this update (Mac OS X, Windows). Now it is also possible to upgrade directly to Adobe Premiere Pro CC, newly available as a Single App plan purchase!