Blackmagic Design's IBC announcements came out today: They bought live green screen compositor Ultimatte, sound hardware manufacturer Fairlight, and updated Resolve to 12.5.2. There are companies out there that buy up smaller companies because they can, and never do anything with what they bought. They bought i systems and have been on a nonstop tear updating the software for the modern era, and giving it away for free. The same has been true with most of their other acquisitions, like the FX platform, the cross conversion Teranex hardware line, and even including Cintel, where they upgraded the film scanner for the modern era (thunderbolt!) in a move that they must have known had a very, very small market. At this year, Blackmagic announced their acquisition of both Ultimatte and Fairlight. Ultimatte is an Emmy and Oscar Award-winning company, founded in 1976, that specializes in realtime image keying. This obviously is very useful in the television and live event world, with the ability to key in a weather map behind a newscaster, or a variety of sets behind performers, which has been a longtime mainstay of their toolkit. However, with the increasing use of and compositing in narrative production, live keying is becoming increasingly common on narrative sets of all sizes, including some of the smallest indie productions. Blackmagic continues their path of dominating all of motion picture post-production from the moment of image capture all the way through final delivery. A live key is a great tool for ensuring that your lighting on set is properly matched to the elements you are planning on keying against, and is also useful for creating roughly-keyed dailies to enable editorial to start working on an edit with a rough key already in place that was overseen by the DP, director and client on set. However, most indie live key tools haven't been particularly powerful or sophisticated, and I look forward to seeing the Blackmagic magic in play here with a lower price point options and integration with the rest of the Blackmagic suite sure to come. With their purchase of Fairlight, Blackmagic continues their path of dominating all of motion picture post-production from the moment of image capture all the way through final delivery. Fairlight makes both audio software and hardware tools for motion picture post, including massive mixing boards capable of delivering 5.1, DTS MDA, Dolby Atmos, NHK’s 22.2 and more. XCOM Enemy Unknown Patch 3 Incl Slingshot Pack DLC-FLTDOX. ┌──── FairLight DOX. This patch must be installed on top of XCOM_Enemy_Unknown_Update_1. While it remains to be seen how closely they will be able to integrate these sound tools into their primary editing and finishing tool, Resolve, we can be confident that this will lead to some indie friendly audio mixing boards designed to work in close conjunction with the Blackmagic video output cards and adapters. At this point we just need Blackmagic to buy a creation platform and one company will have pretty much covered the whole pipeline. Fairlight board.Credit: Bklackmagic Anyone who has gone through the process of setting up a 5.1 review system will surely be excited to hear news of this acquisition. We are likely to see very affordable systems for the small post house and independent filmmaker to at least add 5.1 monitoring to small suites, and perhaps we will even see some indie friendly tools for more sophisticated systems like Atmos as well. However, if history is any indicator, the big boards will likely remain out of reach; the only thing that hasn't gotten dramatically cheaper with DaVinci is the big DaVinci control surface, which continues to sit at $30K, and it doesn't seem like Blackmagic will be able to give us an affordable big mixing board anytime soon. Resolve is updated to 12.5.2, with better fusion connect in Linux, better integration with the metadata functions of the Mini, and color space tagging for Quicktime export.
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