By Jim Hutchison
You’ve certainly had your hands on Blackmagic Design equipment at least once a week if not more often working in this industry – a shoutout to my fellow nerds out there rocking a DeckLink 4K Extreme 12G capture card – and it’s been that way for an extended period with Blackmagic Design products. Media server folks and lighting designers have been using Blackmagic capture cards to previz everything under the sun for well over a decade. Their cards and camera equipment are high-grade, production quality, and used cross-spectrum in Entertainment.
For this article, I was sent a Blackmagic Design ATEM Mini video switcher (MSRP $295), one each of a Blackmagic Studio Camera 4K Plus (MSRP $1295) and a Blackmagic Studio Camera 4K Pro model (MSRP $1795), and a Blackmagic Web Presenter 4K (MSRP $695). With this equipment and a handful of my own Monoprice cables, I was able to successfully pipe a live feed with multiple sources to a dummy broadcast, in 4K.
We are, as in the Entertainment Production market segment, a large component of their market share. However, we are not their entire market share, and that is incredibly positive for us as an industry. Blackmagic Design’s very wide industrial reach across segments like Education and Marketing allow them to quite literally create some technological and financial magic through research, development, and hard-charging industrial usage. Case in point, these three product lines have developed because they understand how we operate, and their product workflows help novice users quickly move into knowledgeable territory by gently but quickly immersing us with user comfort in the interface.
Read the full review at PLSN Magazine
