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BLACKMAGIC DESIGN ACQUISITIONS: ULTIMATTE AND FAIRLIGHT


20th
SEP 2016


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Article Posted by:
RICK YOUNG
Blackmagic Design acquisitions: Ultimatte and Fairlight
Blackmagic Design announced at IBC 2016 that the company had acquired both Ultimatte and Firelight. In this interview, Tim Siddons, Director of Sales for Blackmagic Design, comments about the acquisitions and what this could mean for customers.
Blackmagic acquisition of Ultimatte

At IBC 2016 Blackmagic Design announced its acquisition of Ultimatte, the worldwide leader in blue and green screen removal technology for the broadcast television, commercial and feature film industries.

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. Almost every newscaster and weather reporter stands in front of a green or blue screen while delivering the news and weather. 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 was founded in 1976 and has won an Emmy for their realtime compositing technology, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, as well as an Oscar.

“Ultimatte’s realtime blue and green screen compositing solutions have been the standard for 40 years,” said 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!
Blackmagic acquisition of Fairlgiht

At IBC 2016 Blackmagic Design 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.

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.

Fairlights editing software and fully featured audio post consoles give customers complete tactile control along with unique features like time compression and expansion that allows audio within a single clip to be precisely aligned to picture. Designed for the film and television post production markets, Fairlight also creates immersive 3D audio workstations so customers can deliver 3D sound in formats such as 5.1, DTS MDA, Dolby Atmos, NHKs 22.2 and more. Fairlights 3D audio workstations are large format mixers with complete support for both 2K and 4K video playback.

“Fairlight creates the worlds most powerful digital audio software and hardware for video production,” said Grant Petty, Blackmagic Design CEO. “The exciting part about this acquisition is that it will add incredibly high end professional audio technology to Blackmagic Designs amazing video products. We look forward to working with the Fairlight team to build even more exciting new products for our customers!”

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