DaVinci colour grades going cheap

Blackmagic Design is to unleash high-end colour grading at low end prices, offering the full capabilities of a DaVinci Resolve system as software for OS X at only $995. Its new Resolve version 7.0 basically does what previously took a system costing $200,000 upwards, although you have to provide your own Mac – and the DaVinci controller hardware (if you want it) does cost extra, although still a significant price reduction at $29,995.

DaVinci is the gold standard of colour correction and grading systems, used by most high-end facilities, and in the OS X configuration will be good enough for HD or even 2k work in realtime. For top-end use (such as 3D movies), the price has also dropped dramatically, from more than $800,000 to about $150,000 for a fully featured Linux multi-processor system. Blackmagic Design only bought DaVinci six months ago.

Certainly, for any Mac users that find Apple's Color software insufficient for their purposes, Resolve sounds like a fantastic deal. It should be available by July.

Have a look at the TVB Europe story for lots more information.

By David Fox