Sue Lawson at NAB 2017 where she has decided that black magic puts the “B” in NAB that’s what it stands for now these guys are awesome they never fail to excite and inspire and this year was really no exception in fact this year they hit it out of the park, again.
Resolve will step up to the introduction that you’ve given it. Here at NAB, Blackmagic has DaVinci Resolve 14. And 14 is not really just a small incremental upgrade this one’s a big leap forward in terms of what we’ve done with Resolve. People know resolve of course for it’s color correction tools. It’s been used for decades in terms of color correction. Blackmagic took Resolve into the editing side of things as well. By introducing all the edit functionality. And Blackmagic has now gone one stage further. The demo as NAB had the software setup on an iMac with DaVinci Resolve 14. It also included the micro panel. This just gives the user all the control of grades. And what they’ve added, is an extra tab at the bottom of Resolve that toggles to the audio post-production tools. Fairlight is embedded into Resolve as an application. Now what that means, is that with one click, you can go between your edit, your grade, your audio post-production. Typically the standard workflow has been to finish and lock down your edit or your grade move that project into audio, to have all the audio dialogue, the sound effects and everything finished and tightened up etc.. But what happens when somebody wants to take a shot down or replace something or extend something or trim something and that audio track that runs beneath is now how to sync? Or all the sound effects are out of sync? The ability now with DaVinci Resolve 14 is for all of those people in the post-production pipeline to work together. So these people are not working independently any longer, your editor, your colorist, your audio engineers are all working on the same timeline the same project the same media and that’s just going to change post-production workflows forever.
Blackmagic has made our lives so much easier. Editors can sleep at night because of the tools that they have given us. The integration of this absolutely amazes us. So whether or not truthfully whether or not you are a one-man band having to do it all and a lot of the post places are these days because the producers with those shrinking budgets they want you to do it all and they want you to do it all at a very very reasonable price. Blackmagic, again you you set the bar that nobody else is is coming close to.
The interface when we look at the Fairlight side is Fairlight can have a thousand tracks of audio. If you want a thousand tracks is some acceleration in hardware. On a standard computer you’ll get up to sixty tracks which is going to be more than most people ever need. A lot of people might be those small individual production guys that you know the camera guys are the same as the editor, is the same as the colorist, is the same as the the audio engineer. It’s one person and and they need access to that same tool set to finesse and finish there their project so that it looks at the quality they want. Now of course they can do that now for the first time because it’s all built into the application. Some in the higher end suites may be saying “well are you trying to make the colorist into an audio engineer?” They’re not. What they are doing is giving people the tools that they need to be successful. The specialisms will remain.
It’s every bit as important that we’ve got those key specialists within the post-production environment. But what they are saying is that when something needs to change, when something needs to be tweaked, and that happens daily or even hourly. So what they now can do in cases where you have guys down the hallway that are just going to go “well no worries I can fix that audio, no problem because we’re working on the same material the same project”. So, what we’re seeing here is within all the audio tracks. You’ll see is how quickly how you can scrub the audio, with the J, K, L functions on the keyboard. It’s got immediate playback. It can handle 5.1, 7.1 or 22.2 surround sound. The power of this is unbelievable. Now of course we we’re looking at this on software only but they have the Fairlight consoles too. So you can build a Fairlight console to match whatever your need is using the fader panels and the edit controllers. So if you want hardware control over that final mix or over the editing, you can build a console that’s designed to fit your needs. And that’s all modular and it’s all really easy. So starting software, move this into the suite, into the console. So the the opportunity, the power, the flexibility is really is kind of cool. It’s making a lot of people really interested on the on the show floor.
The DaVinci Resolve 14 is of course available for free as a public beta today, so you can download a public beta of Resolve today and there’s the free version DaVinci Resolve studio was previously priced at $995 we’ve done a 70% price reduction on that and dropped it to $299. DaVinci Resolve 14 is absolutely amazing. With that type of price point you can’t afford not to jump in and take advantage of all this. BlackmagicDesign.com
Producer: Bruce Himmelblau
Host: Sue Lawson
Guest: Simon Westland, Blackmagic Design