In a worldwide press briefing over the web, Grant Petty, CEO of Blackmagic Design today announced a number of new products and upgrades. Foremost for me on the list was the new URSA Mini Pro 4.6K, a high-end digital cinema camera with the ergonomics and features that will also allow it to function as a traditional broadcast camera. Besides new features to add versatility, they seemed to fix and improve many small things users have been giving them feedback about. The camera now has built in optical ND filters, dual CFAST 2.0 AND dual SD/UHS-II card recorders, and a new interchangeable lens mount option. It comes with an EF mount and customers can purchase the user serviceable and fairly inexpensive option of PL and B4 lens mounts separately, (soon to also include Nikon).

The 4.6K image sensor captures up to 4608 x 2592 pixels with a claimed 15 stops of dynamic range and a wide color gamut. The URSA Mini Pro can record lossless 12-bit CinemaDNG RAW files for the highest possible quality, or 10-bit ProRes files for easy post production workflows and lesser storage requirements. URSA Mini Pro 4.6K is available now for $5,995 from Blackmagic Design resellers worldwide.

Also announced today was were two new Davinci Resolve control panels, the “Micro Panel” and the “Mini Panel”. They are both have a smaller hardware footprint than their famous big brother which is a staple of many DI suites with streamlined features designed for editing workstations and on-location use. The Mini Panel still has 3 high resolution weighted trackballs, 12 control knobs for advanced primary color correction, 18 dedicated navigation and transport keys at an MSRP of $995. The DaVinci Resolve Mini Panel features all that plus an upper deck with two 5” screens, 8 soft knobs and 8 soft buttons, with dedicated keys for switching, working with nodes, grabbing stills, navigating the timeline, etc. The Mini has an MSRP of $2,995, and both panels are available now.  Both control panels require the latest software, DaVinci Resolve 12.5.5, which is available for download free of charge from the support page of the Blackmagic Design website. DaVinci Resolve Studio 12.5.5 is available to existing customers, free of charge, from the Blackmagic Design website.

It was also announced that DaVinci Resolve and DaVinci Resolve Studio are now available for Red Hat and CentOS Linux. Adding Linux support gives customers more choice in hardware, allowing them to build extremely high performance, low cost workstations for editing and color correction.

For more information, please go to www.blackmagicdesign.com