How Blackmagic Design keeps on creative thinking and come out with innovative offerings?
Blackmagic Design is a technology company, focusing on revolutionary audio and video broadcasting solutions. Their wide range of software and hardware product list meet needs of various businesses. Over the years, they keep on succeeding from their own records in terms of quality, stability and innovation.
It is our honour to interview Mr. Richard Lim, Director Asia, Blackmagic Design. Please read on.
What are the core vision and philosophy of Blackmagic Design?
Blackmagic Design set out to revolutionize the TV and Film industry by developing products with cutting edge technology at affordable prices so that creative people can actually buy and use them to create content. It’s about democratising technology so that not only huge corporates can use them. This is so that creativity can empowered and all we focus on is about making great creative content which is what it is really should be about.
How your entire team make sure that all your products remain aligned to it?
When we come together, we make sure that everyone in this team understand this culture and where and to whom the company is trying to bring the technology to. We will get there when we understand this. The company is a very flat company with a lot of room for innovation, talking out ideas etc – so creativity and innovation is really part of the culture of Blackmagic Design.
Your technology team keep pushing the envelope and come up with innovative products. How BMD maintain such growth hacking?
We simply love blowing our users mind about what they can do with cutting edge technology. So while it is tough and a hell lot of word to do to keep innovating, it never gets bored!!! I guess passion about what we are doing is one key reason why we keep innovating.
Which are BMD’s best products for audio creation and manipulation? Please describe in detail.
Blackmagic Design acquired Fairlight a few years back and since then we have integrated Fairlight as an audio page in Davinci Resolve. Fairlight is a high-end Audio creative tool for decades and continue to be so. By putting Fairlight in Davinci Resolve, we have now a complete tool for creativity and dedicated set of engineers to develop Fairlight further.
Fairlight is known for its speed and flexibility in audio post processing. Coupled with its hardware control console, you have an audio work station that harness the high processing power of today’s computing technology and a fast editing console. As such, it empowers a creative audio engineer to have more space and time to create different ideas, and thus better Audio creation and manipulation. There are more to Fairlight than it is and now Fairlight is in both the Free and Studio version of Davinci Resolve for users to try it out.
Which are BMD’s best products for video creation and manipulation? Please describe in detail.
This is a hard one and there is no way I am able to choose. Blackmagic Design provides an end to end ecosystem for content creation from Acquisition, Recording, Live production, Broadcast and Post Production. In each and every category you have great creative video products.
For e.g., in Acquisition, we have the world’s smallest Cinema Camera in the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4k and 6K where not only it is more affordable, it is designed with the specifications of high end cameras for filmmaking. On the other end of the chain, we have Davinci Resolve which is the go to tool now for Editing, Color Correction and Grading, Compositing, Audio Post Processing and Delivery. And, we give a free version of it away as well!!!
The best Blackmagic Design products for Video Creation is really the end to end Ecosystem we are providing.
Due to fast changing technology, many products become obsolete fast. How does BMD keep tab on this, as you have large family of broadcasting and supporting products (including various software and hardware)?
Well, we guess we just keep innovating across all our products lines and keep upgrading them. We are currently in our 4th Generation of products so over the years, we keep innovating, we keep talking to our customers and we keep improving it. It just keeps getting better and what pushes us is the huge customer base out there that we have and they keep this communication with the company going, to be better and better.
How BMD maintain productive office environment?
Passion and Innovation.
We are seeing a huge surge in content of OTT platform. How various tools of BMD are catering this new medium?
It is still all about providing content isn’t it? Well, we keep doing what we do and making it better. With better technology access, creatives can create better content and eventually these content gets to where the viewers sees them.
One update on this point, BMD has joined Netflix’s Post Technology Alliance on 2nd October, 2018.
- Our software product “DaVinci Resolve” is selected for three technology categories: Color Grading, Editorial and IMF & Media Encoding.
- Our hardware products “URSA Mini 4.6K” and “URSA Mini Pro” are selected in ‘Camera’ category.
Using such robust combination, the Director can focus more on storytelling, visualization and overall filmmaking. Our audio and video products will take care of entire technical and post production pipeline.
BMD is very aggressive on online / offline Marketing and PR front, as it is always visible in various local and international shows and events. Apart from this channel, how do collect customer feedback?
We have a lot of offline activities that is focus on providing a forum for us to interact with our users. Human interaction is where ideas form. So Blackmagic Design does a lot of Seminars, Workshops and Events that allow us to talk to a wide range of our users and this is how we get to interact with our customers and know what works and what doesn’t.
Your website has an unique look and feel, with impressive images and clutter free text contents. How BMD zeroed in for such attractive and responsive design?
We just try to keep our messaging simple about the products and technology. We focus on trying to talk about how these can be used to better audio and video creation. The idea is our customers wants to know how these products can be used and what they do and we try to make it easy to understand the cutting edge technology. Our simple messages are often encouraging and inviting so you can come into this creative world and start creating!!!!
We thanks Mr. Richard Lim for taking out time from his busy schedule for the interview. Looking forward to see more success stories of Blackmagic Design.