Hi,

It’s NAB 2017 time and we have been working on a few projects we would love to update you on. This year we have a very big update to DaVinci Resolve, as well as a few new products. Including a wonderful new all in one ATEM Television Studio Pro HD switcher!

Here is a short list of new products and updates.

• Major new DaVinci Resolve 14
• New ATEM Television Studio Pro HD
• Bluetooth support for URSA Mini Pro
• 10 languages on Blackmagic Video Assist
• Full scopes on Blackmagic Video Assist 4K
• New UltraStudio HD Mini for Thunderbolt 3
• Blackmagic Duplicator 4K H.264 update
• New lower price for Ultimatte 11

There are also lots of other details, which I will cover for each update below!

DaVinci Resolve 14

Today we announced DaVinci Resolve 14, the biggest release in the history of the software! It's quite a dramatic upgrade. With this update, we were really focused on solving some of the bigger problems in post production.

The first problem was performance. We have made some dramatic performance gains and DaVinci Resolve 14 is now up to 10 times faster than the previous release. It's very fluid now and much more responsive.

Also another big issue in the film and television industry is audio. For years we have been sending audio off to people in the music industry to do our audio post production. Then we have to wait for them to finish and import the finished audio file back into our edit. It's very slow and cumbersome.

What we really need are audio tools designed specifically for the film and television industry. With DaVinci Resolve 14 we have built in Fairlight audio on its own new page in the software. It's incredibly powerful and can play back up to 1000 tracks with parametric EQ, dynamics and plug ins on every track, all in realtime, when used with the Fairlight Audio Accelerator card. It's also very powerful when run on a stock computer system as well.

Because audio for film and television is a lot more complex, we think integrating it into DaVinci Resolve will make it so fast and easy. It’s just a button click away. Plus, it also works with the full sized Fairlight consoles so it makes an amazing combination.

To make this workflow really fast, you really want people to be able to edit, color and do audio post production all working together, on the same job at the same time. To make this easy DaVinci Resolve 14 now integrates extremely powerful collaboration tools to make that easy.

With editing, advanced color correction and these new Fairlight audio tools, DaVinci Resolve 14 is like getting 3 high end applications in one! We hope it dramatically changes post production from kind of a linear to a more parallel workflow, so everyone can work at the same time, giving editors, colorists and audio engineers more time to be creative.

The performance improvements and new audio features are built into the free DaVinci Resolve software you can download for free. However, the new collaboration tools and some of the new plug ins are only available in the paid DaVinci Resolve Studio.

The good news is that we have reduced the price of the full DaVinci Resolve Studio to only $299, so it’s much more affordable now.

We have a public beta of DaVinci Resolve 14 available today, so you can download it from the Blackmagic Design website and try it yourself. We would love to hear your feedback!

ATEM Television Studio Pro HD

Recently we launched ATEM Television Studio HD, a portable live production switcher for broadcast, professional and AV users which has been extremely popular because it had powerful features such as 8 inputs, re-sync in each input, built in DVE, aux out, support for talkback, chroma key, flash based media store and also a control panel on the front!

Today we released the new ATEM Television Studio Pro HD, which has all of the same professional features, but is integrated inside of a professional desktop mounted control panel. You can now get all those ATEM Television Studio HD features built right into a professional control panel!

Plus, you get a full CCU control area on the top of the control panel so you can control cameras for doing amazing multi camera live work. This works with all Blackmagic Studio and URSA Mini cameras that can be controlled via the SDI.

The control panel on ATEM Television Studio Pro HD is extremely high quality. It uses the same high quality buttons that our highest end switchers use, plus there are a lot more buttons for transition selection, keying and more.

ATEM Television Studio Pro HD adds an integrated hardware control panel which is great for more complex, fast paced live events. It features 4 HDMI and 4 SDI inputs so you can work in all formats up to 1080p60.

We think the new ATEM Television Studio Pro HD will be perfect for all kinds of work from professional studio or live sport broadcasts, to internet talk shows, concerts and seminars, and more!

ATEM Television Studio Pro HD will be available in May for US$2,295

Bluetooth for URSA Mini Pro

When we recently launched Blackmagic URSA Mini Pro, we kept its Bluetooth feature secret until now. We have developed a new iPad app that gives you full remote control of the camera settings as well as metadata entry. We are also going to open the protocol to developers who want to use the API to customize their own control solutions.

With a fully open API and developer support for bluetooth on URSA Mini Pro, customers can build applications to remotely adjust camera settings, control the built in DaVinci Resolve color corrector, add metadata, sync cameras and much more! The possibilities are endless and we’re excited to see what you’re going to make with it!

While this will be shipping next month, we will be demonstrating it on the booth at NAB and would love to show you!

Blackmagic Video Assist Updates

We also announced Video Assist 2.4 update which adds support for localized interfaces in 10 different languages! So now it's much easier to use worldwide because it runs in your native language!

We support Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish! All you need to do is connect your Video Assist or Video Assist 4K to the USB and select the language you want in the Video Assist Utility software!

This Blackmagic Video Assist 2.4 software update will be available today for download for all Video Assist models and free of charge.

But that’s not all we have done for Blackmagic Video Assist! This year we also have new professional scopes that have been added to the Video Assist 4K model. These new scopes are professional, highly accurate and include waveform, RGB parade, vectorscope and histogram. They can be used full screen, you can overlay them on top of the incoming video, or put them in a small picture in picture window.

I think these scopes are incredibly powerful. I want to use them next to my grading monitor so I can see RGB parade when doing editing and grading. But I think they also make a nice broadcast scope to use around production areas. Of course they are also great for setting exposure on cameras too!

The new scopes will be available in June as a free software update for all Blackmagic Video Assist 4K customers. We will be showing them in the Video Assist section of our NAB 2017 booth.

New UltraStudio HD Mini

Today we also introduced UltraStudio HD Mini, the world’s first portable Thunderbolt 3 capture and playback solution designed for archiving, edit monitoring, streaming and live broadcast graphics.

With UltraStudio HD Mini, we have taken a different direction by including some new connections people needed, and dropping some of the connections people don’t use anymore. No one uses analog out anymore!

However, people are capturing from older analog and digital broadcast decks for archiving content to modern digital media files. People also want to run live graphics into switcher with fill and key and of course we often need to get high quality monitoring in HDMI and SDI when editing and color grading and need perfect AV sync. It also works with Open Broadcaster software for live 1080p streaming.

UltraStudio HD Mini has been designed to do these tasks well, and we have fit it all into the small Teranex Mini sized design. It's even Thunderbolt powered so you don’t need to connect it to a power supply. You can even power it from your laptop battery! You can sit it on your desk beside your laptop, making it a great portable solution to take on the road.

If you add the optional Teranex Mini Smart Panel you also get video, audio meters and status, including a new frame buffer indicator to assist in evaluating disk performance on broadcast systems. You can also rack mount multiple units using the Teranex Mini Rack Shelf.

UltraStudio HD Mini includes 3G-SDI and HDMI outputs for edit monitoring. Plus the 3G-SDI outputs are dual link so you can output separate fill and key to live switchers.

The inputs include 3G-SDI as well as Y,Cr,Cb analog component or NTSC/PAL inputs, along with balanced analog inputs for connecting to older digital or analog broadcast decks for archiving. There are even deck control and reference inputs!

UltraStudio HD Mini is in stock and available now from Blackmagic Design resellers worldwide for only $495. The optional Teranex Mini Smart Panel is $85.

H.264 for Blackmagic Duplicator 4K

When we launched the Blackmagic Duplicator 4K last year, it was received well and people understood the idea of doing live production and selling content to customers directly.

The problem is that we got ahead of ourselves. H.265 has not been adopted as widely as we hoped. So this year we are releasing a software update that adds H.264 to the Blackmagic Duplicator 4K. It's a free software upgrade and, because H.264 is so popular, everyone you sell content to can read the files!

This software update is available now and you can just download it to get this new format. Now you should have confidence that when you give someone the media from the duplicator that they can read it!

Of course the H.264 files are bigger than the same video compressed to the more modern H.265, however for the duplicator, that's only a few dollars more for the blank media cost. We still hope that H.265 will become more widely adopted and people can start using it more, however H.264 will do well in the near future!

The Blackmagic Duplicator 1.1 update is available now as a free download from the Blackmagic Design website.

Ultimatte 11 Now More Affordable

Finally, we announced an immediate price reduction for Ultimatte 11 from $24,995 to only $9,995.

Since we acquired Ultimatte in October, last year, we have been working on its production and we have made some very good improvements. We think this price reduction is dramatic, but the real reason for working so hard on making Ultimatte 11 more affordable is because we want to help people get an Ultimatte on every camera in a live set.

We think people can build their own virtual sets by using multiple locked off cameras on a green scene set. If the keying looks real, and Ultimatte does that, but also if you don’t move the cameras while they are on air, you can build your own virtual set using still frames keyed in behind the locked off cameras. It’s a nice simple way to get started into virtual environments, but the issue was Ultimatte previously cost way too much to be able to do this.

Of course for decades Ultimatte has been the worldwide leader in blue and green screen removal technology for the broadcast television and feature film industries, so you get a high quality keyer that can do an amazing job in making virtual sets look truly realistic. We hope this reduction in price helps people explore their creative options for virtual environments. In many ways you can almost get 3 Ultimatte 11’s for the same as what a single Ultimatte 11 cost a year ago!

We have a separate Ultimatte booth this year and its down the hall a little from our main Blackmagic Design booth, so people go and check it out!

That's about it for this year. We are going to be filming the press conference again this year, so if you would like to learn more, please follow the link below to watch the video.

We really want to thank you for supporting us throughout the year. We couldn’t do it without you and if you are heading to NAB this year, please drop by our booth as we would love to catch up for a chat!

Grant Petty
CEO, Blackmagic Design