NAB Is on and Blackmagic Design has knocked it out of the park! New hardware, cameras, color panels, and DaVinci Resolve (which now includes color density and negative saturation)

Wow, I can’t believe how much that Blackmagic Design announced and released this year at NAB. And so much people have been asking for. Now I can only touch on what is important to me, so am skipping a huge amount of what they announced.

So lets start with DaVinci Resolve 19, now in Beta, you can see what is new here.

So there are a so many new features that will be helpful like Intelligent Media Management:

DaVinci Resolve 19 adds intelligent media location management, so that when you are collaborating you can quickly link media to your unique file paths. Now you don’t need to manually relink or search for assets when you work remotely. So you have more time for creativity and less time on file admin!

Text Based Timeline Editing and multiple voices in AI Speech to Text Transcription brings it up to Premiere, which is great.

There is AI Based Voice Isolation:

The AI based voice isolation track FX let’s you remove loud, undesirable sounds from voice recordings. Isolating dialog from background sounds in a recording, you can eliminate everything else from moderate noise to aircraft and explosions leaving only the voice. Voice isolation is perfect for interviews and dialogue recordings from noisy locations.

A Built-in Dialogue Leveler:

The dialogue leveler track FX in the inspector processes and smoothes dialogue recordings without the need for tedious level adjustments on clip gain or automation curves. Controls include real time scrolling waveform display, focus presets and three process options which allow you to easily achieve natural sounding results.

AI Driven Ultra NR Noise Reduction:

UltraNR is a new DaVinci Neural Engine driven denoise mode in the Color page’s spatial noise reduction palette. Use it to dramatically reduce digital noise from a frame while maintaining image clarity. Combine with temporal noise reduction for even more effective denoising in images with motion!

Composite Mode within Nodes will speed things up:

Corrector nodes in the color page node editor now features composite mode. These composite modes will allow you to affect how node values blend into the pipeline without the need of a layer mixer. This means that your node graph looks cleaner and it’s faster and easier to follow the signal flow.

The Defocus Background plugin looks to vastly improve background blurs with harder edges to make shots look more filmic and less processed.

The game changing Film Look Creator:

The new Film Look Creator lets you add cinematic looks that replicate film properties like halation, bloom, grain, flicker, gate weave and vignetting. Adjust exposure in stops and use subtractive saturation, richness and split tone controls to achieve looks usually found on the big screen!

And ColorSlice Six Vector Grading:

The ColorSlice palette uses subtractive color processes to adjust image color density, saturation and hue, allowing you to produce rich filmic colors and looks. Parameters in each customizable vector slice let you enhance and deepen color without spill, in a way that looks naturally pleasing.

This is probably the stand out new feature for me, as the last few years everyone has been using both paid and free DCTL plugins to add a much more filmic Color Density to an image, and they have also included negative saturation, which increases saturation by lowering the saturation of the opposite colors, giving a much more filmic look.

I might have to go back and play with my short to see what these features can really do!

And then we have Blackmagic PYXIS 6K, which takes the 6K Full frame sensor they recently relased and puts in a fully riggable size (Unlike the old BMPCC cameras) an has the options of PL EF or L- Mount for $2995 to $3195. This is basically what everyone has been asking for, with the only complaints being the lens mounts aren’t interchangeable, and the screen doesn’t fold out (and the URSA Cine EVF is an additional $1695, youch). I do love the side mount with the straps for an SSD though!

And I love my 6K Pro, and don’t need this, since I have mine rigged out, I would love it, but this just means when I need a new one, they will have something even better!

Then we have the new DaVinci Resolve Micro Color Panel for $499:

While without the screens or jog wheel of the Tangent Wave 2, but adding the 2 shift keys it actually likely has more functionality (though without labels for the changing shift functionality) than the $1000 device, plus the slot for an iPad at the top and a huge battery to run wireless. Honestly they just need to make the Gain wheel function as the jog wheel, and they will have replaced the usefulness of the Tangent Wave 2 (Except it working in programs other than Resolve.

And of course the Blackmagic URSACINE V2, moving it’s incredible 12K camera forward another step. Sure I will never own one of these, though I would love to, though at $16,495 with EVF and no $1695 8TB Media Modules. It is pretty amazing that the sensor has a color filter array, which means it can use the full sensor for lower resolutions, so you can use the whole sensor.

And they released so much more hardware, like the Replay Editor, which I don’t do live so I don’t really understand. Wow.

Socratica FX on Setting Files in DaVinci Resolve & Fusion

From Socratica FX on YouTube.

This deep dive into the Settings files that come out of Fusion (and Fusion in DaVinci Resolve) from Blackmagic Design. It is very cool that the settings files are just simple text files. Not only can you go into the files, but you can do things with the text files to create macros.

And don’t you wish all saved bins and files were like this, so that you could always just go in and see them as a plain text file and see if anything is wrong? This is how all save files should be saved!