[Gustavo Bermudas]

This one right? Found it on the Smoke forum

Hi,

This is a message from Grant Petty, CEO of Blackmagic Design in response to this thread:

**********

Hi,

We usually keep postings to our own CreativeCow forums but there are some erroneous statements made here about our products being cheap knock offs and made in China that we need to correct.

Over the years, Blackmagic Design has introduced technologies and products well before anyone else. DeckLink HD Extreme 3D cards have 3 Gb/s SDI, internal and external keying, hardware up, down and cross version, 12 bit support, HDMI, analog video and 16 channel SDI embedded audio support. It comes with our own Media Express software with DPX, batch capturing, mastering to tape support and more. As you can see, this is a feature rich product and can hardly be called a cheap knock off.

Back in 2007, we introduced 3 Gb/s SDI into our products, including a new real time, full 24 fps capture and playback of full aperture 2K (2048 x 1556). This made film workflows as simple as video workflow so now full aperture 2K can be routed via routers and also sent to HDLinks for monitoring. We also published the specification of this format in our user manuals so that anyone can implement and adopt this technology.

Sony has just introduced this 2K format in their latest SRW-5800/2 HDCAM SR decks, so we can hardly be considered making cheap products if we are developing and introduction technologies that Sony ends up adopting.

We just introduced the worlds first USB 3.0 video products, and the UltraStudio Pro is a design like nothing else the broadcast industry has ever seen and I think its innovative and a practical solution that looks good while hiding all the cables. These are totally unique products that we spent years developing.

We also have a long track record in the US, and it’s our biggest market. We have multiple engineering facilities here, and the center of our support network is based in the US, plus most of our component suppliers are US based as well. We have always had a strong US presence, and we are hiring more people in the US than we are in any other country right now. We also just purchased EchoLab, which we will announce in a few days time, and that gives us an even bigger US presence and track record.

As to which card is the best? I think that’s difficult to answer. Different products have different features, and the whole point of being open is so that customers can buy the products that best suit their requirements. If you like something else, then you’re free to buy it but there’s no reason to be so vindictive towards us. We love competition because it helps everyone improve and ultimately, the customer benefits. Without our products, do you think you would be paying so little for cards from other brands that you like?

Now, to address Rory’s original question about Smoke compatibility.

We have been asking AutoDesk for almost a year now about that. Until they did the Mac version, we did not have much interest in Smoke because it was a closed system that customers could not assemble themselves. However, the introduction of the Mac version changed that.

We are so keen on supporting Smoke on the Mac that we have almost completed the video component for DeckLink cards without their help. There’s only some small remaining bits left that we need from AutoDesk to finish it. Hopefully, AutoDesk will get back to us quickly and we should see some results soon.

We originally started Blackmagic Design not to make low cost products, although that’s fun to do because it’s so hard to do. The reality us we are from the post production industry and we started doing this back in 1995 because we just wanted to be able to use computer software such as Adobe Photoshop for high end broadcast graphics. This was in the days before Final Cut Pro, when you had to use an Abacus A66 disk recorder with ethernet to get video between the SDI and computer worlds.

It’s funny to think back, but my first product was an SD still store card with Photoshop plugins back in 1997 which cost $4,000!

We wanted to use software such as Adobe Photoshop, After Effects and Premiere for post production because they were great tools then, and are still great today. We did not want to be locked into a particular turnkey system and adding an SDI card into a computer and using these open software tools was the way to do it. We thought this could be an amazing future, and even thought I asked everyone I could talk to at SIGGRAPH 1994, everyone said there was no market for it. So we started making video products to do it ourselves.

This is why we have fought for over 15 years to ensure that things are open and remain open. That’s what Blackmagic Design is about.

This is also the reason why we even visited the NAB booths of other capture card and control surface manufacturers on the very day DaVinci Resolve on the Mac was announced at NAB 2010. We wanted them to know we were going to open up DaVinci if they wanted to support it on their producers. So far, some have responded very positively to that, so that’s exciting.

Smoke is the only software I have ever seen that runs on the Mac that supports capture and playback of video, but does not let you use any video hardware to capture and or playback video.

I think this is really bad, as it cripples what people can do in their workflow. We are talking with them, and it’s looking good, but please help us by letting Autodesk know if your using other brand video cards and want them to work.

Could you imagine buying some software and then finding it only prints on a single model from a single brand of printer? It would be weird.

I hope this updates everyone.

Regards,

Grant
Blackmagic Design

****************

regards

Kristian Lam
Blackmagic Design

[Gustavo Bermudas]

Wow, no one answered…

[Gustavo Bermudas]

I think he should start offering Avid training now, it’s going to be in high demand

[Gustavo Bermudas]

I actually started using MC 5.5, got the FCP trade promotion, and I find it very stable, but the “stability” I was referring to, is not much of performance, is that of a software that continues to improve without having to do re-writes based on superstitious assumptions that versions 8 and 9 are bad, and leave you starting over again getting plugins that work, and so on, you get the idea.
Right now I can edit straight from R3D files, prores, all I was ever asking FCP to do.
I’ll still use FCP, but I’m starting to appreciate more what Avid is doing, at least there was never hysteria when they realese a new version.
All I hope they do, is that they support more 3rd party hardware cards, which at NAB they told me they will.

[Gustavo Bermudas]

And since we’re adding / fixing, how about Kona support? Nothing personal, but I’d really like to have the HDMI port in the same card. Besides, it’s been promised, right?

[Gustavo Bermudas]

Me too, I’m very anxious, specially the free version, I have to color time a movie in Color, and at my work they’re not buying Resolve, so the free one would be a life saver, specially because of scene detection, otherwise I have to manually cut it the 90 minutes quicktime, and two nodes is more than enough, and if not, I guess I’ll render out the clip and bring it back, not ideal but you gotta do what you gotta do…