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With this beta program, registered V-Ray users can get their hands on new and improved features and capabilities of the best version of V-Ray yet. Thanks to Chaos Software's continuous work with 3D artists all over the world, V-Ray 3.0 for 3ds Max has now become the most complete lighting, shading and rendering toolkit on the market. The V-Ray 3.0 for 3ds Max Beta program is available to licensed users of V-Ray for 3ds Max. You may register for the beta program here. The Beta program will run for a period of approximately 3 months.

Autodesk released a new edition of Maya 2014, Maya LT, specifically tailored for indie and mobile game developers. Maya LT includes all the tools necessary for independent game developers creating assets for PC, web, and mobile games. Based on the Maya 2014 release, Maya LT includes full modeling parity with Maya (support for NURBS, polygons, UVs etc.), including the Modeling Toolkit as well as full texture baking with Turtle, plus low resolution Texture Baking preview!

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.