Blackmagic Design Announces Major DaVinci Resolve 7.1 Update

Press Release from Blackmagic Design

Milpitas, CA (December 22, 2010) - Blackmagic Design announced today a major update to DaVinci Resolve,  the world’s most popular high-end color grading system on Mac OS X and Linux.

The new DaVinci Resolve 7.1 now adds DaVinci's legendary clustered multi GPU processing power to Mac OS X systems when used with a PCI Express expansion chassis. The new DaVinci Resolve 7.1 also includes greater control through upgraded support for Tangent Wave™ control surfaces and support for the JL Cooper Eclipse CX control surface. New file formats and codes supported in DaVinci Resolve 7.1 include Arri Alexa ARRI RAW, Phantom Cine, high dynamic range OpenEXR and more.

This major update is available today for download from the Blackmagic Design DaVinci website for all existing DaVinci Resolve customers at no charge.

With the new DaVinci Resolve 7.1 update, Mac OS X users can now take advantage of a massive improvement in processing power by installing multiple high performance GPUs. This “super computer” processing power, previously only available on Linux systems, smashes the single GPU limit for a single computer and lets customers increase processing power simply by adding additional GPUs as their businesses grow.

Also supported in the DaVinci Resolve 7.1 update is the ATI 5770 graphics card for the user interface and the Cubix x16 PCI Express expansion chassis for use with multiple GPUs. Support for the expansion chassis allows flexibility to install additional storage, video capture cards, multiple Nvidia Quadro 4000 GPU processing cards, and Red Rocket cards. This means customers get greater cost savings and complete freedom to build high performance color correction systems on Mac OS X.

DaVinci Resolve 7 introduced support for third party control surfaces, and DaVinci Resolve 7.1 expands this support. Now included are more menus on the Tangent Wave™ control surface including menus for stereoscopic 3D and version control, individual adjustments for curves and image clipping, direct access to stills and memories and new keyer controls for post mixing offsets. DaVinci Resolve 7.1 also adds support for the popular JL Cooper Eclipse CX control surface. Only DaVinci Resolve 7.1 gives colorists a complete range of options from mouse or tablet operation, third party control surfaces and the premium Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve control surface.

As the post production and film industries are rapidly advancing into higher quality digital film production, DaVinci Resolve 7.1 includes a wide range of new file formats and codec support for the latest professional cameras and scanners. New file formats include native real time support for Arri Alexa ARRI RAW and D-21 ARRI RAW , Phantom Cine files, OpenEXR in uncompressed and compressed formats, Sony MPEG-4 SStP (Simple Studio Profile) and Sony XDCAM files in QuickTime format. Because support for real time grading direct from Arri Alexa ARRI RAW files is handled in the GPU, no extra hardware is required. No other color correction system available today supports as many high-end DI file formats for real time color correction on Mac OS X.

DaVinci Resolve 7.1 also includes new Stereoscopic 3D color grading controls, including timeline slip to sync left and right eye, auto left and right eye color matching, pitch and yaw keystone control and side-by-side and line-by-line rendering. This new update adds additional project configurations including improved drop frame timecode support, 720p50 and 720p conforming, 1080p50, 1080p59.94 and 1080p60 monitoring as well as automatic multi project ColorTraceTM support for transferring digital dailies grades.

This new software update adds new user interface displays including clip count display on the color screen primary grading tab, session duration display on the conform screen, a new slate option to show source clip name and additional autosave options. DaVinci Resolve 7.1 also enhances RED grading controls by including REDcolor2 and Adobe 1998 colorspace support, REDgamma2 gammaspace support, automatic camera metadata support for HFlip and VFlip, ganged adjustment of decode settings and support for saving RED metadata in stills for copy and paste.