Think of It As an Outboard DeckLink Card for Your MacBook or iMac

Blackmagic Design (Milpitas, CA) has started shipping UltraStudio 3D, its $995 Thunderbolt-enabled portable capture and playback system for the Mac. As its name implies, the UltraStudio 3D, announced at this year's NAB, supports full-resolution dual-stream 3D – as well as interleaved, side-by-side, and frame-packed stereo 3D formats – via the unit's dual-link 3 Gb/s SDI ins and outs. The box also has HDMI 1.4a in and out, and a slew of other connections are available via breakout cable – analog component, s-video and composite, and balanced analog and AES/EBU audio input and output.
The 3D-workflow features are powerful, with the Thunderbolt connectivity making dual-stream 3D manageable even on a notebook computer. “For many years, people have come to us saying, ‘How do I get my Decklink card to work with a laptop?’,” Blackmagic President Dan May tells StudioDaily. “With Thunderbolt, for the first time, we have connectivity on the Apple side to hook up an uncompressed solution to all these different Apple computers in a practical, real-world way. Before, if I wanted to do on-set color-grading with a Da Vinci Resolve, I had to drag a Mac tower in with a Decklink card inside. Now I can take my MacBook Pro with UltraStudio 3D in and do real, on-set color-correction with very little loss of functionality compared to using a tower. That’s a critical shift in our environment, and it opens a lot of doors for the post community.”

Version 3 of Blackmagic’s Media Express software, which is included, has now been upgraded to handle both interleaved and full-resolution dual-stream 3D to ensure compatibility with current NLEs that won’t support full-resolution stereo imagery. What’s more, the new hardware architecture supports 10-bit up-/down-/cross-conversions.


May declined to discuss the company’s sales expectations, but said demand has been reliably strong for more widespread use of mobile workstations. “It’s no surprise people have been looking for mobile solutions, but there always had to be some kind of sacrifice,” he says. “Maybe I have to use a proprietary codec, or I can monitor but not capture. There was always an asterisk. But being able to have 10 Gb per second in multiple directions? That’s quite a doorway for information to get through.”

Blackmagic is “actively engaging” in figuring out where else Thunderbolt fits into its product lines, but May says it’s hard to tell which products will be brought to market first. “As always, the company is driven by customer feedback and demands,” he says. “It’s always hard – we come to NAB with 20 new product announcements and we think they’re all compelling, but you never really know until you put them out in public.” In other words, Blackmagic is unlikely to make its next move until it hears back from Thunderbolt’s earliest adopters.

For more information: www.blackmagic-design.com.