As always, Blackmagic Design had a number of new products to announce at IBC. But their biggest news to release, was their acquisition of Eyeon Software, makers of Fusion 7. I have never used Fusion myself, but I have heard of it over the years, usually because it was one of the supported applications of the hardware I was using. Based on the description, it appears to be an After Effects competitor, in both the motion graphics and compositing space. It will be interesting to see where that partnership goes, but I foresee integration with DaVinci Resolve, which just had an 11.1 update released at the show. The other new product that stands out, is their Smartview 4K full resolution SDI monitor. It has built-in LUT color processing support, and Teranex based resolution scaling. It will be interesting to see how good the panel in that is when it is released in December.
AJA didn’t announce any new products, but their CION camera is getting closer to release, which I am looking forward to seeing in action. Sony had two new cameras worth mentioning. The PXW-FS7 is a 4K XDCam camera with a Super35 sensor, that records 10bit 4:2:2 with various codec options onto XQD cards. The PXW-X200 is a 3-chip 1/2″ chip camera with a fixed 17x lens, that shoots XDCamHD to SxS cards in XAVC or MPEG-HD. In other camera related news, Canon has also announced the 7D MkII, which combines the features of the existing 7D and 70D products, with better HDMI output options, and 1080p60 recording capability.
On the software front, Avid Media Composer is no longer limited to HD frame sizes. The new resolution imdependent version supports DNxHR, the high resolution successor to the DNxHD codec. It edits 2K and 4K footage at various aspect ratios, and can even render high quality DPX files.
Adobe announced updates to many apps in their Creative Cloud tool set, the most significant of which are in Premiere Pro. They have added a feathered bezier masking tool into their effects settings, that can automatically track objects that are selected. They also have made major improvements to the project manager, and integrated full support for Cineform files. They added AJA RAW file support and claim to have improved the GPU acceleration of debayering and playback of large frame sized RAW camera files from Red, Canon, and CinemaDNG. Exciting to me, they are supposed to have better support for HiDPI displays in both After Effects and Premiere, as well as the rest of their applications.
