|
First thoughts: Fusion in
Resolve, ProRes RAW, more
By Mike McCarthy
These are my notes from the first day I spent browsing the NAB Show floor this year in Las Vegas. When I walked into the South Lower Hall, Blackmagic was the first thing I saw. And, as usual, they had a number of new products this year. The headline item is the next version of DaVinci Resolve, which now integrates the functionality of their Fusion VFX editor within the program. While I have never felt Resolve to be a very intuitive program for my own work, it is a solution I recommend to others who are on a tight budget, as it offers the most functionality for the price, especially in the free version.
The Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K looks more like a “normal” MFT DSLR camera, although it is clearly designed for video instead of stills. Recording full 4K resolution in RAW or ProRes to SD or CFast cards, it has a mini-XLR input with phantom power and uses the same LP-E6 battery as my Canon DSLR. It uses the same camera software as the Ursa line of devices and includes a copy of Resolve Studio… for $1,300. If I was going to be shooting more live-action video anytime soon, this might make a decent replacement for my 70D, moving up to 4K and HDR workflows. I am not as familiar with the Panasonic cameras that it is closely competes with in the Micro Four Thirds space.
Among other smaller items, Blackmagic’s new UpDownCross HD MiniConverter will be useful outside of broadcast for manipulating HDMI signals from computers or devices that have less control over their outputs. (I am looking at you, Mac users.) For a price of $155, it will help interface with projectors and other video equipment. And at $65, the bi-directional MicroConverter will be a cheaper and simpler option for basic SDI support.
AMD was showing off 8K editing in Premiere Pro, the result of an optimization by Adobe that uses the 2TB SSD storage in AMD’s Radeon Pro SSG graphics card to cache rendered frames at full resolution for smooth playback. This change is currently only applicable to one graphics card, so it will be interesting to see if Adobe did this because it expects to see more GPUs with integrated SSDs hit the market in the future.
Read More >
|
|
 
|
