If there is one company that thrives on NAB launches, it’s Blackmagic Design. This year they gave us a fighting chance of taking in their prodigious output by phasing the announcements from a week preceding the event.
Last week we learned about Blackmagic Cloud, DaVinci Resolve 18, and the new Cloud Store devices. Blackmagic Cloud is a platform for project sharing and collaboration, as well as highly efficient means of review and approval. As you might expect, it’s affordable - only the host pays for the service, which is a fairly nominal $5 per library per month.
To make use of this new cloud-based workflow, you’ll need the latest version of DaVinci Resolve, now in its 18th iteration and released at NAB as a public beta. As with all previous major releases (and quite a few so-called dot releases), DaVinci Resolve 18 is chock-full of new features, but probably the most significant is the ability to log into the Blackmagic Cloud and store project files remotely instead of locally.
With a cloud-based workflow in place, Blackmagic can diversify into new areas, for example storage. It wouldn’t be Blackmagic if there wasn’t a low-cost, smartly designed chunk of hardware to leverage free-of-charge software. Cue Cloud Store and Cloud Pod. Reincarnating the eGPU body of a few years back, Cloud Store is essentially network-connected storage in 20TGB, 80TB and 320TB configurations. Intriguingly, each has an HMDI port to connect to a screen to view a data management dashboard.
The smaller Cloud Store Mini has only 8TB of storage, while the Cloud Pod has no internal storage – you just plug in your own SSD via USB-C.
At the show itself, Blackmagic Design unveiled a major facelift of its switcher line with the introduction of three new ATEM Constellation models. The new models are a 1 M/E model with 10 x 3G‑SDI inputs, 2 M/E model with 20 x 3G‑SDI inputs and a 4 M/E model with 40 x 3G‑SDI inputs. As you might expect, the specs borrow heavily from the flagship ATEM Constellation launched four years ago, but the pricing is typically ‘Blackmagic’ – the 1 M/E unit starts at just $995!
To complement the new switchers, Blackmagic also announced new 30 and 40 button versions of the ATEM Advanced Panel.
Over at rig specialists Kondor Blue we saw the new Shoulder Pad Air – an air-cushioned shoulder mount that’s not only inflatable, but machine washable too! Pricing is to follow after the show.
In other news, PROMISE debuted VTrak N-Series storage, their first NAS storage solution optimized for post-production file sharing and collaboration. Available in two form factors – the N1008 tower and N1616 3U rackmount - the N-Series incorporates high-performance NVMe for blisteringly fast read/write throughput of up to 6GB/3GB. Each model has the option of eight 10G Base-T ports, eight 10G SFP+ ports or four x 25G SFP28 ports.
PROMISE also demonstrated Pegasus32 and PegasusPro storage working with Mac Studio, showcasing the first Driverkit based (DEXT) driver introduced with macOS Catalina. It replaces the older KEXT kernel extensions and improves system stability and security.
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Holdan's Gear of the Year 2024
Live HD Production Switcher - 1 M/E
Live HD Production Switcher - 2 M/E
Live HD Production Switcher - 4 M/E
Turn any USB disk into network storage
High Performance Network Storage with Global Sync - 20TB
High Performance Network Storage with Global Sync - 80TB
Fast network storage solution in a compact rack mount design - 8TB
Shoulder Mount with Air-cushioned pad to perfectly set air pressure - Space Grey
Shoulder Mount with Air-cushioned pad to perfectly set air pressure - Black
Professional 2 M/E hardware panel with 30 input buttons on each row and 2 independent system control LCDs, one for each row. Get 8 LCDs for custom labels and each row includes a separate select bus
4 M/E rows with 40 input buttons per row and 4 system control LCDs. With 32 LCDs, you can custom label every button on every row
Turn any USB disk into network storage