AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS —
Blackmagic Design (
www.blackmagicdesign.com
) announced two key acquisitions during the IBC 2016 show in Amsterdam. The company has acquired Ultimatte, the blue and green screen removal technology for the broadcast television, commercial and feature film industries company, as well as Fairlight,
which creates professional digital audio products for live broadcast event production, film and television post production, as well as immersive 3D audio mixing and finishing.
Founded in 1976,
Ultimatte has been known for delivering broadcast quality compositing results that make virtual sets indistinguishable from real sets. Ultimatte creates realtime blue and green screen removal hardware that is used in broadcast studios around the world to seamlessly composite reporters, talk show hosts and more into virtual sets. For the past 40 years, Ultimatte has been deliverying hardware or software solutions for keying people in front of weather maps, stock charts, and other info graphics. In fact, many of these newscasters are using Ultimatte to place them into completely virtual sets.
Ultimatte uses advanced 4:4:4:4 image processing and provides enhanced matte controls that lets customers accurately separate the subject from the background. Customers also get matte correction features, indirect and direct lighting features, spill suppression tools, edge artifact controls and more, all in realtime.
“Ultimatte’s realtime blue and green screen compositing solutions have been the standard for 40 years,” says Grant Petty, Blackmagic Design CEO. “Ultimatte has been used by virtually every major broadcast network in the world. We are thrilled to bring Ultimatte and Blackmagic Design together, and are excited about continuing to build innovative products for our customers!”
Blackmagic Design has also announced its acquisition of Fairlight, which has a history of designing and manufacturing integrated audio control surfaces and software that are renowned for their speed, flexibility and exceptional sonic quality. Fairlight Live products feature consoles that are designed for demanding on-air and live productions, giving customers advanced audio processing and control surfaces that range from 12 to 60 faders, along with audio I/O interfaces with full redundancy for mission critical work in broadcast facilities, outside broadcast trucks, performing arts venues and houses of worship.
For post production solutions, Fairlight creates everything from compact desktop audio post systems to large format mixing consoles with dedicated controls. Fairlight audio engines can deliver up to 1000 tracks which lets customers create complex productions without premixing, along with a massive 64 channels of monitoring.
Fairlight’s editing software and fully featured audio post consoles give customers complete tactile control along with unique features like time compression and expansion that allows audio within a single clip to be precisely aligned to picture. Designed for the film and television post production markets, Fairlight also creates immersive 3D audio workstations so customers can deliver 3D sound in formats such as 5.1, DTS MDA, Dolby Atmos, NHK’s 22.2 and more. Fairlight’s 3D audio workstations are large format mixers with complete support for both 2K and 4K video playback.
“Fairlight creates the world’s most powerful digital audio software and hardware for video production,” says Petty. “The exciting part about this acquisition is that it will add incredibly high-end professional audio technology to Blackmagic Design’s amazing video products. We look forward to working with the Fairlight team to build even more exciting new products for our customers.”