Blackmagic Design constantly makes things more accessible to more filmmakers in very tangible ways.
From their extremely affordable Pocket Cinema Camera line, to their inclusion of DaVinci Resolve with every camera purchase (not to mention the lite version as a free download), to a recent announcement about the price of the Blackmagic Ursa Mini Pro 12K.
Credit: Blackmagic Design
Ursa Mini Pro 12K Price Drop
The Ursa Mini Pro 12K is now $5,995. This is around $4,000 cheaper than it was previously.
Blackmagic states that the price drop is made possible by increased efficiencies in manufacturing combined with an improved stock of 12K sensors, a sensor that Blackmagic designed and created themselves.
This is obviously a hugely generous price reduction, considering the camera is capable of shooting in resolutions from 4K all the way to 12K in Blackmagic RAW and has all of the professional ENG-style controls and buttons you could need on the outside of the camera. Personally, I love the camera and have jumped at every opportunity to use it.
I'm a big fan of the Ursa Mini form factor, and I plan to purchase one as soon as I can afford it (which apparently will come quite a bit sooner than previously thought).
Credit: Blackmagic Design
DaVinci Resolve 17.3
Switching back to Mac is just looking more and more enticing every day.
Blackmagic has also announced a new version of Resolve that includes support for a new processing engine that makes the software work up to three times faster on Apple M1 machines. They state that this makes 8K resolution projects possible on an Apple M1-equipped notebook.
The new processing engine uses tile-based rendering and gives customers 30% longer battery life while editing on laptop computers. On M1 machines you can also enjoy new support for H.265 hardware encoding. You can also choose between speed and quality rendering, which is said to increase render times by up to 65%.
Credit: Blackmagic Design
Among some other interface updates for all users of the software, Resolve now has over 300 new features and improvements, expanding HDR grading tools and redesigned primary color controls.
“This is truly an amazing update that gives customers huge performance and power efficiency gains on Mac models with M1, and it totally transforms your computer, simply by downloading this free-of-charge DaVinci Resolve software update,” said Grant Petty, Blackmagic Design CEO.
As someone who has been strongly considering heading back to Apple for video editing, while also hovering over the buy button on an Ursa Mini Pro for a while, this is a devastating day for my wallet (admittedly not as devastating as it was, say, one day ago).
