Blackmagic Design announced that Japanese postproduction company Upside rebuilt their studio around Blackmagic Design 12G-SDI technology. As part of their upgrade from HD to 4K60p support, the company installed DaVinci Resolve Mini Panel, DaVinci Resolve Micro Panel, Teranex Express, DeckLink 4K Extreme 12G, Smart Videohub 12G 40×40 and Videohub Smart Control.
Upside was founded in 2012, specializing in editing and color grading for dramas and short films. It also has departments for shooting and lighting, and supports the complete workflow from shooting to postproduction. To meet the demand for more 4K60p content, Upside decided to upgrade their existing HD studio to support 4K60p in September last year. There are three audio engineering rooms, seven editing rooms and one grading room. Many Blackmagic 12G-SDI products were installed in the machine rooms, as well as in the editing and grading rooms.
“We already had DaVinci Resolve Advanced Panel in the grading room. Online editors can apply color correction, now that we installed DaVinci Resolve Studio and Mini Panels in every online editing room. It eliminated the necessity to go to the grading room and has made the workflow more efficient. We sometimes produce a project simultaneously with DaVinci Resolve Studio, grading the material in a grading room and applying effects in an editing room. It makes the workflow enormously more smooth since you can work on a project at the same time. We also installed DaVinci Resolve Micro Panels and because you can carry around DaVinci Resolve Micro Panels, we sometimes use them for color correction on location,” said Kazunari Kurusu, a director of the postproduction department.
By building the machine room with Blackmagic 12G-SDI products, they were able to reduce cables and make connections simpler. There are 4K and HD monitors in the grading and online editing rooms, where Teranex Express is used to convert 4K signals to HD and which are also used in the online editing rooms.
In the company’s machine room, they have installed two units of Smart Videohub 12G 40×40 routers, one for HD and the other for 4K. These are at the center of the whole post production system, with signals switched on Videohub Smart Controls installed in each editing and grading room. Multiple units of DeckLink 4K Extreme 12G are used for inputs and outputs on every machine in the editing and grading rooms.
“There were no other possible choices for us when we planned to build this machine room other than using Blackmagic products, many of which support 12G-SDI. We had been using Blackmagic products for five years with no problem so we find them reliable and trustworthy. Not only are they affordable, the performance of every product is wonderful,” he concluded.