Blackmagic Design announces acquisition of eyeon Software, Inc.

Last year when I upgraded my very old Fusion license with thier xmas/F7 special I kind of got the feeling they were getting a little desperate. And F7 not shipping until this month really didn't help them very much at all. The early gold release candidates have been a bit buggy (though the last build, 1420, has actually been pretty solid). I was kind of hoping Adobe would be the one to acquire them, but maybe Blackmagic is a much better fit. It will be interesting to see if they can improve the areas eyeon has been very weak on (documentation, user training, website/customer communication). Not sure how the lack of a Mac version is going to work with Blackmagic, who seem to be very Mac-centric. I wonder if they will end their maintenance contract oriented sales system? Interesting times to be sure.
 
Eyeon certainly looked ripe for acquisition. I'm personally very happy that Blackmagic was the one to buy them. I was thinking about upgrading my old DFX+ license to F7 after I decided to quite using Adobe. I'm very excited to see what route they go in getting Fusion to connect to Resolve. I actually wrote to Eyeon a couple months ago with a request to see them make Connection work with Resolve. I'm sure they will release a mac port at some point.
 
I had Digital Fusion back in the 90´s. It was the Sh*t then. Smoke, AE and others took over in the "affordable" marketspace.
I hope Fusion becomes a strong competitor again, since Motion seems stuck in 2005.
 
I had an original DOS license of Digital Fusion, and would get tech support direct from Steve Roberts. In pre-AE on the PC days, it was the only game in town. While I use AE for most motion graphics, any of my VFX work on films and film-style shots I use Fusion to this day. I grew to know the people behind the code, and have always thought of them as extended family. The Ultra-keyer's spill suppression settings (rare/medium/well-done) were named after some problematic blue-screen cow footage I sent them in early days to help trouble-shoot some nasty edge fringing.

At one point, about the time of the first Windows NT version, DPS (Digital Processing Systems... remember the PAR, PVR, the Reality and Velocity?) held the money-strings. So having a parent company is not un-familiar territory for them. Who knows what sort of future this might represent? I agree this is interesting times, but I wish these guys the best, that's for sure. I've never been a big NUKE fan, for no real reason other than the people I worked with were Fusion-centric and I like the code...

Regards,
 
Postmaster said:
Yes, and I suddenly feel like an old fart, because I can remember them.
Click to expand...

Being an old fart is fun, 'cause you can ramble. I still have working copies of every one of those boards (or I assume they still work); PAR, PVR, Hollywood, Reality, RealityHD, and VelocityHD. The DPS NLE boards made me independent of post houses, and the PVR was a watershed product. Digital Fusion was always tightly integrated.

One fun side note... DPS (or was it by then Leitch?) had the Reality board set... and a variant of it called RealityHD... it was to HDCAM as the low cost DV boards were to miniDV.. pure data transfer from deck to harddrive... DPS licensed an obscenely expensive per copy software version of the HDCAM codec from Sony... and the Eyeon guys re-wrote it with a massive speed increase. You still needed an HDCAM deck with the 3K "optional" HD-SDI card to make it work... I don't know if they ever sold more than a very small hand-full of them... I still have one... Fusion was the software input-output for it.

After reading the press release... I still don't get a sense of the direction BM will take the Eyeon products... cheaper? Integration? Just don't know.
 
DF linked to the DPS Hollywood and a small SDI Sony trinitron broadcast monitor, that was great value and a powerful system back over a decade ago. Jim and Frank, now words and memories, such as Pigsfly and Speed Razor come to mind...
 
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