Los Angeles, CA - July 26, 2018 - Blackmagic Design announced today that the Hollywood Professional Association (HPA) named DaVinci Resolve 15 as one the recipients of their 2018 Engineering Excellence Awards. The awards are a spotlight outstanding technical and creative ingenuity in media, content production, finishing, distribution and archive.

DaVinci Resolve 15, released at NAB this year, offers a major step forward for post-production workflow, a significant shift in technically and creatively matched toolsets as well as overall efficiency. The platform, designed to provide a full suite of post-production tools, from ingest to delivery, directly integrated in a single ecosystem, includes significant improvements in quality, functionality and time to delivery. Exchange formats, translation and conform can be eliminated, and last-minute change efficiently managed for feature film, episodic TV and short form productions.

DaVinci Resolve 15 features an entirely new Fusion page for feature film quality visual effects and motion graphics animation. Fusion was previously only available as a stand alone application and is the world’s most advanced visual effects and motion graphics software. It is now built into DaVinci Resolve 15. The new Fusion page gives customers a true 3D workspace with over 250 tools for compositing, vector paint, particles, keying, rotoscoping, text animation, tracking, stabilization and more. Adding Fusion to DaVinci Resolve has been a massive project that will be completed over the next 12-18 months. Customers can get started using Fusion today to complete nearly all of their visual effects and motion graphics work. The standalone version of Fusion will continue to be available for customers who need it.

In addition to bringing Fusion into DaVinci Resolve 15, Blackmagic Design has also added support for Apple Metal, multiple GPUs and CUDA acceleration, making Fusion in DaVinci Resolve faster than ever. To add visual effects or motion graphics, customers simply select a clip in the timeline on the Edit page and then click on the Fusion page where they can use Fusion’s dedicated node based interface, which is optimized for visual effects and motion graphics. Compositions created in the standalone version of Fusion can also be copied and pasted into DaVinci Resolve 15 projects.

DaVinci Resolve 15 also features a huge update to the Fairlight audio page. The Fairlight page now has a complete ADR toolset, static and variable audio retiming with pitch correction, audio normalization, 3D panners, audio and video scrollers, a fixed playhead with scrolling timeline, shared sound libraries, support for legacy Fairlight projects, and built in cross platform plugins such as reverb, hum removal, vocal channel and de-esser. With DaVinci Resolve 15, customers no longer have to worry about audio plugins when moving between Mac, Windows and Linux because the FairlightFX plugins run natively on all three platforms.

DaVinci Resolve is the fastest growing nonlinear video editor in the industry. It’s also Hollywood’s favorite color corrector. Blackmagic Design has listened carefully to feedback from professional colorists and editors. DaVinci Resolve 15 includes over a hundred new features and improvements that editors and colorists have asked for.

Colorists get an entirely new LUT browser for quickly previewing and applying LUTs, along with new shared nodes that are linked so when one is changed they all change, multiple playheads for quickly referencing different shots in a program, over 5x performance improvement for stabilization, improved noise reduction, and new Super Scale HD to 8K up-rezzing. DaVinci Resolve 15 also expands HDR support with GPU accelerated Dolby Vision metadata analysis and native HDR 10+ grading controls. In addition, new ResolveFX let customers quickly patch blemishes or remove unwanted elements in a shot using smart fill technology. There are also new ResolveFX for dust and scratch removal, lens and aperture diffraction effects, and more.

Professional editors will find new features in DaVinci Resolve 15 specifically designed to make cutting, trimming, organizing and working with large projects even better. DaVinci Resolve 15 has dramatically improved load times so that large projects with hundreds of timelines and thousands of clips now open instantly. New stacked timelines and timeline tabs let editors see multiple timelines at once so they can quickly cut, paste, copy and compare scenes between timelines. There are also new markers with on-screen annotations, subtitle and closed captioning tools, auto save with versioning, greatly improved keyboard customization tools, new 2D and 3D Fusion title templates, image stabilization on the Edit page, a floating timecode window, improved organization and metadata tools, Netflix render presets with IMF support and much more.

Winners will be recognized at the annual HPA Awards in November.

Press Photography

Product photos of DaVinci Resolve, and all other Blackmagic Design products are available at www.blackmagicdesign.com/media/images

About Blackmagic Design

Blackmagic Design creates the world’s highest quality video editing products, digital film cameras, color correctors, video converters, video monitoring, routers, live production switchers, disk recorders, waveform monitors and real time film scanners for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries. Blackmagic Design’s DeckLink capture cards launched a revolution in quality and affordability in post production, while the company’s Emmy™ award winning DaVinci color correction products have dominated the television and film industry since 1984. Blackmagic Design continues ground breaking innovations including 6G-SDI and 12G-SDI products and stereoscopic 3D and Ultra HD workflows. Founded by world leading post production editors and engineers, Blackmagic Design has offices in the USA, UK, Japan, Singapore and Australia. For more information, please go to www.blackmagicdesign.com.

LAS VEGAS--Mark Aitken, vice president of advanced technology for Sinclair Broadcast Group is the recipient of the 2018 NAB Television Engineering Achievement Award, which he will receive at an April 10 ceremony at the NAB Show. 

In its announcement, NAB called Aitken a “dynamic leader in the development of Next Gen TV.” Aitken has been involved in the broadcast industry’s migration to advanced services, including participation in the FCC Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service, involvement in ATSC including chairing the specialist group on mobile DTV, and with the formation of Sinclair's joint venture ONE Media, serving as its President.

TV Technology caught up with Aitken after the news, for which he said he was “honored” for the recognition. Over the course of decades of involvement with the broadcasting industry, he has worn numerous hats, getting his start with CCA Electronics, a small Massachusetts-based TV transmitter manufacturer in the mid ‘70’s. He counts Richard Fiore Sr., the founder of what was to become Comark Communications in 1976, as his mentor. “We just hit it off,” Aitken said. “Rarely in your life do you find yourself in a situation where you feel like ‘this is where I belong.’ And before long it blossomed into what I always refer to as my mentorship in this industry and into the world of radio frequency design.”

[Read: SMPTE 2014: Aitken—Broadcast Must Be More Than TV]

Early on at Comark, Aitken got to know Fiore’s business partner, David Smith (yes, of Sinclair) as well as Nat Ostroff, who became president of the company in the ‘80’s. By the end of the ‘90’s Aitken moved to Baltimore ostensibly joining Sinclair to rebuild Acrodyne, a company acquired by Sinclair to provide transmitters for the "digital transition."

Beyond Acrodyne activities, Aitken became focused on problems over the RF capabilities of the newly minted ATSC digital TV standard (at Smith’s and Ostroff’s prompting), an issue he characterized, as “Houston, we have a problem.”

“Ray Kiesel and I got handed the job of ‘we’ve got to figure out what’s wrong with this standard because we’ve got to make it work, it’s our future, we don’t have a choice,’” Aitken said. Despite Sinclair’s advocacy for an alternative to 8-VSB that would enhance mobile reception, their efforts came up short. The experience taught Aitken a valuable lesson.

“What I learned was that you must understand politics and business to understand technology, because technology in the marketplace doesn’t end up there simply based on the best engineering,” he said. “It arrives there based on business use cases.”

As a result, Aitken, along with many of his colleagues at Sinclair, became heavily involved in the development of ATSC 3.0, forming ONE Media and focusing on mobility and more efficient use of spectrum. It’s primarily due to these efforts that he is being recognized by NAB.

[Read: Q&A: Mark Aitken On Dallas Next-Gen SFN Trial]

“For me, this award is very much in line with the FCC’s elevation of the Next Gen standard and the engagement of our industry,” he said.

As for his future with Sinclair, Aitken says “I’m not going anywhere,” but he is cognizant of the importance of bringing “new blood” into the television industry. Promoting Next Gen TV is key to attracting new engineers, he said.

“Next Gen is not your father’s or your grandfather’s television,” he said. “Next Gen is so much more. I think it’s everybody’s job to sort of toot the horn.”