IBC 2016: Blackmagic Design acquires Ultimatte, Fairlight; unveils new Teranex AV converter
Blackmagic Design announced its acquisition of Ultimatte, a leader in blue and green screen removal technology for the broadcast television, commercial, and feature film industries. The company also announced its acquisition of Fairlight, which creates professional digital audio products for live broadcast event production, film and television post production, as well as immersive 3D audio mixing and finishing.
Ultimatte is known worldwide for delivering broadcast quality compositing results that make virtual sets indistinguishable from real sets. Ultimatte creates realtime blue and green screen removal hardware that is used in broadcast studios around the world to seamlessly composite reporters, talk show hosts and more into virtual sets.
For the past 40 years, Ultimatte has been the industry standard hardware or software responsible for keying these people in front of weather maps, stock charts, and other info graphics. In fact, many of these newscasters are using Ultimatte to place them into completely virtual sets.
Ultimatte uses advanced 4:4:4:4 image processing and provides enhanced matte controls that lets customers accurately separate the subject from the background. Customers also get matte correction features, indirect and direct lighting features, spill suppression tools, edge artifact controls and more, all in realtime.
“Ultimatte’s realtime blue and green screen compositing solutions have been the standard for 40 years,” says Grant Petty, Blackmagic Design CEO. “Ultimatte has been used by virtually every major broadcast network in the world. We are thrilled to bring Ultimatte and Blackmagic Design together, and are excited about continuing to build innovative products for our customers!”
Fairlight has an impressive history of designing and manufacturing integrated audio control surfaces and software that are renowned for their speed, flexibility and exceptional sonic quality. Fairlight Live products feature consoles that are designed for the most demanding on-air and live productions, giving customers leading edge audio processing and control surfaces that range from 12 to 60 faders, along with audio I/O interfaces with full redundancy for mission critical work in broadcast facilities, outside broadcast trucks, performing arts venues and houses of worship.
For post production solutions, Fairlight creates everything from compact desktop audio post systems to large format mixing consoles with dedicated controls. Fairlight audio engines can deliver up to 1000 tracks which lets customers create complex productions without premixing, along with a massive 64 channels of monitoring.
In addition, Blackmagic unveiled the new Teranex AV broadcast-quality standards converter specifically designed for AV professionals. This model is similar to the Teranex Express, with specific features for live production use such as low latency, a live freeze frame, and internal still store for adding logos and graphics, plus the 1,089 conversions for any format to any other formats up to 2160p60. The very low latency lets you convert video and output it to a projector in sync with the live presenter which is very important for live production.
The company also announced upgrades to its popular DeckLink Mini Monitor and Mini Recorder products. These new models include all of the same powerful features of the HD models, but add Ultra HD and HDR support.
Lastly, Blackmagic is showing the new Video Assist 2.2 Update, a major new update which adds new features to the Blackmagic Video Assist 4K model. These new features make it easier for you to adjust exposure and check focus, because it adds new false color monitoring exposure tools and expanded focus assist options. The company also released DaVinci Resolve 12.5.2, a new update that adds support for additional metadata embedded into the RAW files from Blackmagic URSA Mini cameras running the new operating software, and announced a a US$1,000 price reduction for HyperDeck Studio 12G to only $1,495.