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and Blackmagic acquires Fairlight and Ultimatte
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A CMI in an FPGA. That’s really cool. Too bad I already have a Kurzweil K2000 I don’t know how to play. 🙂
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Does anyone else remember the Ultimatte demo videos from the 1980’s. Amazing stuff back in the day.
Maybe Black Magic Design will revive the comics with Professor Warhol.
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Software only Fairlight supports ASIO on Windows, but not Core Audio. I hope BM will bring Fairlight to the Mac OS.
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[Peter Gruden] “I hope BM will bring Fairlight to the Mac OS.”
Sure seems likely based on what else they’ve done!
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[Peter Gruden] “I hope BM will bring Fairlight to the Mac OS.”
[Tim Wilson] “Sure seems likely based on what else they’ve done!”Given Fairlight uses a PCIe FPGA card I see potential problems getting a full Fairlight system working on Macs. Software only yes but it will be a baby Fairlight by comparison. Fairlight have been very conservative about OS choices in the past only supporting Win7, 64 bit recently. No Win 10, Linux or Mac OS.
So don’t hold your breath for a full blown Fairlight DAW working in other than a Windows environment. Parts of Fairlight are likely to make their way into Resolve for other platforms and their controllers.
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[Michael Gissing] “Given Fairlight uses a PCIe FPGA card I see potential problems getting a full Fairlight system working on Macs. “
We run multiple PCIe cards on trash can MacPros everyday with no performance penalty. If we can push 800MB/sec of video per seat, I’m sure we can get some audio down the pipe as well.
I know you don’t want it to happen, but it might happen. 🙂
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[Jeremy Garchow] “We run multiple PCIe cards on trash can MacPros everyday with no performance penalty. If we can push 800MB/sec of video per seat, I’m sure we can get some audio down the pipe as well. “
I would guess latency would matter as much if not more than bandwidth, but your point is valid.
BMD seems quite committed to being the cross-platformiest vendor out there. There was a lot of Windows-specific code in Fusion. Eyeon’s Linux version relied on Wine to run parts of Fusion. That didn’t seem to deter the BMD dev team… or even allow them down all that much.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Jeremy Garchow] “I know you don’t want it to happen, but it might happen. :)”
Personally I have no desire not to see it happen. I just know the guys at Fairlight and the reasons why they have kept it to a limited range of Windows OS (XP and WIn7 only). They really like to make a system that will not tie up their small but incredibly talented software team keeping the range of compatibility with various OS robust. They also prefer turnkey or limited hardware options. Supporting thunderbolt to PCIe adaptors with FPGA hardware is not trivial. There is also the issue of their IP based control surfaces having to be compatible with a bigger range of OS options too. They have also had very specific requirements of supported graphics (NVIDIA only) and I/O cards (Decklink only with specific desktop software).
I know what a big deal it was just to make a software only version which relied on talking to windows audio drivers. Supporting other OS will take both an enlarging of the team and taking on people who know Apple OS and perhaps Linux. The very fact that Apple have such a fast OS cycle is also a reason why I know there will be reluctance to develop for that platform.
Fairlight is still based on Apple Quicktime player although Blackmagic have recently developed their own Quicktime handler. So what I prefer is irrelevant really to whether Fairlight will be in any hurry to port their big systems with specific hardware needs to another platform.
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[Walter Soyka}”I would guess latency would matter as much if not more than bandwidth, but your point is valid.”
Fairlight has the lowest through latency of any DAW. They also have ancillary hardware interfaces that connect to their FPGA cards for analogue I/O, word clock and video sync. Given the amount of hardware the main Fairlight systems drive from controllers to mixing desks, the porting of Fairlight to any other OS platform is probably far less trivial than Fusion. In Blackmagic terms it took a long time to port Fusion to Mac so don’t expect anything other than paired back Fairlight software to make it into cross compatible Resolve.
There would need to be a good reason to port Fairlight and all its hardware to Mac OS. Blackmagic haven’t done it for the big hardware Resolve Linux turnkeys yet.
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[Michael Gissing] “Blackmagic haven’t done it for the big hardware Resolve Linux turnkeys yet.”
I hadn’t taken that adequately into account with my earlier reply. Software-only, yes, I’d bet strongly in its favor. As Walter noted, I’d previously have guessed that eyeon Fusion would have taken considerably more effort than it turns out to have. Not that BMD didn’t labor, but I think that that entire team’s raison d’etre is to defy expectations.
One of the questions we asked Grant when they acquired DaVinci was about the control surface, and whether it would see the crazy price reductions that some other products had, and he said (paraphrasing), nah, a lot of companies make their money in margins that we don’t need or want, but this one costs about what it costs. We can’t get it lower without compromising its quality and performance, which we’re not willing to do.
I know that we’re not talking about price in this thread, but I wonder if the same thing mightn’t reply. The commendably conservative intent of the Fairlight team to date is ultimately irrelevant. “Commendably conservative” is pretty much the opposite of why Blackmagic does anything, but the question is going to be, can it work on Mac and still work “like a Fairlight”. The answer isn’t “no” until Grant says it’s “no”, and I’m not sure that Grant will often concede anything more than “not yet”.
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