blackmagic+davinci

fxguide quick takes » BlackMagic buys daVinci – confirmed.

Word on a big sale in the post-production industry seems to have broken Labor Day evening that Blackmagic Design is buying da Vinci. Most everyone in post has heard of Blackmagic Design (their convertors and capture cards like the DeckLink and Intensity or the new UltraScope) but I’m often surprised how many are not familiar with da Vinci. da Vinci makes high end color grading and film restoration systems. These are very expensive hardware and software based machines that grade the biggest features in Hollywood. If you’ve never been in a da Vinci suite and witnessed their realtime systems in action or worked in and around a market that has a da Vinci them maybe it’s understandable if you’ve never heard of them. Rest assured that they are legendary and the color grading term of a “power window” wouldn’t exist without them. We have a 2k Plus at Filmworkers Nashville and while it’s not the newest system that da Vinci makes it’s amazingly powerful and produces astonishing images, often from what seems like an unrecoverable frame, at lightning speed. No rendering required.

What’s in store after this acquisition? No one knows for sure so the best we can do now is read the email Blackmagic Design CEO Grant Petty. Thanks for fxguide for breaking this story as it could make some big waves in the post-production industry. Maybe they’ll move forward with that version of Resolve that da Vinci had running on a laptop at NAB 09:

rsolve

As a comment on my Flickr feed where the above image resides says … color me intrigued.