Blackmagic Designs actually announced a thirds camera, the Blackmagic Micro Studio Camera 4K for remote control from a switcher fro $1295.
And the URSA now has 4.6K models for $6995 and $7495 and you will be able to upgrade the sensor in the 4K Models!
BlackMagic have announced two new impressive looking cameras at NAB.
The first is the URSA Mini which ranges from $2995 for the 4K EF Mount, to $5495 for 4.6K PL mount!
Most impressive is that it has a global shutter at 30 FPS, and rolling shutter at up to 60 frames per second, with 15 stops of dynamic range! (I didn’t realize that the 4K sensor does Global Shutter at up 60 FPS, but only has 12 stops of dynamic range, or that the Mini loses it’s upgradeability that it’s big brother has) Wow!
Of course the shoulder kit is another $395 and the full viewfinder instead of the side screen is $1495!
Adam Garstone at Definition Magazine gives a quick overview of these 3 powerful 3D Compositing Programs. Work a read.
After learning Shake years back I would love to get into one of these, but can’t afford either Nuke or Smoke, but once a free Mac version is released of Fusion by BlackMagic Designs I will probably spend the time to learn it, and hopefully they will have added a good 3D camera tracker by then.
BlackMagic Design has done it again, and they have released their recently Purchased Fusion compositing program for free or $995 for the Studio Version with advanced 3D tools, OpenFX plug In support and unlimited distributed rendering.
Awesome news, and I would love to learn this. Going to give me a reason other than gaming to fire up BootCamp and boot into Windows 8 on my Mac, because since learning Shake back in the day I have loved Nodal compositing software. And the true 3D compositing and even 3D model rendering all in one will be pretty amazing.
RedShark has an article on all of BlackMagic Designs exciting new announcements from IBC 2014.
My personal favorites are:
DaVinci Resolve 11.1 is out now.
And BlackMagic has purchased Eyeon Software the maker of Fusion the high end digital compositing, visual effects and Motion Graphics Software! Wow, and lets hope they do to it exactly what they have been doing with Resolve, make it better, and cheaper than ever! Let’s hope they eventually have a free version with full Resolve back and forth for an amazing new free or affordable compositing program! And lets hope for a Mac version very soon!
Fusion looks insane. Node based, but their Sizzle Reel stills looks very very complicated!
It supposedly already supports CUDA for acceleration so it sounds like a great fit with Resolve.
ProVideo Coalition has the news on both.
And DaVinci Resolve 11 Beta has been released with more editing features.
After learning DaVinci Resolve, and being incredibly impressed with it, I decided to learn Adobe SpeedGrade for it’s integration with Adobe Premiere Pro (my current choice of edit software), but so far I have been less than impressed.
First off with Resolve and a good NVIDIA Cuda card, the program works great with BlackMagic or AJA video cards, is rocket fast and you get a recreation of the timeline from your edit program, and can remove shots as needed, or do basic editing. And you have such a great collection of edit controls and presets.
With SpeedGrade you only get a single video track (or 3 if you have dissolves or transitions as it puts the a & B on different tracks and the transition in between). So you need to prep your sequence, and the send from Premiere is even weirder. Instead of using the original media files, it converts everything into uncompressed DPX image sequences, which will take up a huge amount of space (uncompressed files after all) and it bakes in any effects you applied into the clips. So it basically ignores the awesome Mercury playback Engine from premiere, and it’s only real bonus is that your color correction returns to premiere as a filter applied to the clips.
You can work with original premiere pro clips, but not with the send from premiere command, instead you need to export and EDL from Premiere and import the clips into SpeedGrade that way.
And there there is the fact that it doesn’t export video a monitor using Black Magic video cards, only AJA! This sucks. It should work with everything Premiere Pro does!
And as for the color correction, the lack of curves is inexcusable! Curves are such a powerful color corrector and Adobe needs to fix this right away.
I know Adobe purchased this program to compete with Apple Color (now defunct) and DaVinci Resolve and round out their suite, but I would rather see them base the whole program on the amazing Mercury Playback engine from Premiere Pro, instead of having this current attempt at integrating the two programs, which seems more like a cludge than reel integration. Yes, having the color correction return as plug in corrections is very very cool, but so far that is really the only thing cool i am seeing about SpeedGrade.
I have not fully explored or gotten proficient with the program, and I will report back once I have, but so far my initial impressions don’t make me consider moving away from Resolve for my color correction needs.
Personally I have been spending a lot of time with Davinci Resolve of late. With a proper video card it is really an awesome program, and is certainly my current choice for color correction. It is fast and easy to use and does a very good job.
The other interest is SpeedGrade which I am learning, mainly because of it’s ability to roundtrip a grade to Premiere Pro and put it on clips as a single filter on each clip. A very cool feature, but the program needs some work before it can really compete with Resolve. First off it needs support for Black Magic cards instead of just AJA cards. If Premiere Pro can do it, Resolve needs to do it. And second it really does need curves. Curves are such a powerful color correction method that many have come to rely on, and not having them seems a huge failing. Other issues I have are it’s abilities with multitrack video are limited, and I have just gotten so used to nodal vs layer based correcting, though that is certainly not going to change. SpeedGrade is powerful and does work well with Premiere, but needs to get some updates to be able to really rival Davinci even with it’s ability export it’s grades as color correction filters into Premiere.
Overall it sounds like the AJA is a little more Pro, with the ability to record above ProRES HQ in ProRES 4444 (even with the URSA’s upgradeable sensor). Still with no viewfinder you either need a bigger investment or to already have rails and other gear to go with it.
And the worst thing of the Cion, other than not having a viewfinder of it’s own, is that is uses AJA created storage, unlike Blackmagic which uses off the shelf components. Of course hopefully you can then trust them more, but they will cost more.
He is right though, this looks to be the Canon/Nikon of the Videography set.
BlackMagic has announced version 11 of DaVinci Resolve. And of course the Lite version is still free for up to 1080 video and $995 for higher resolution, 3D and noise reduction features.