Blackmagic Buys Fairlight, Then Gives it Away

Not many active musicians have touched stylus to CRT screen on an original Aussie-made Fairlight CMI. The effect of Fairlight’s ground-breaking sample-based computer music editor is more likely to be felt in modern software workstations — like Ableton Live. Fairlight didn’t become ubiquitous in the music production space, instead the company turned its focus to film and broadcast and made arguably the world’s best DAWs for those industries. 

In keeping with its history of innovation and survival in changing markets, Fairlight has once again undergone a phoenix-like transformation to be reborn under the watchful eye of another famous Australian name — Blackmagic Design.

Blackmagic should be a familiar name to audio folk as the divide between audio and video is dissolving rapidly. It started modestly, making digital video I/O cards for editing systems like Final Cut Pro, and has grown into a juggernaut that dominates NAB — the world’s biggest broadcasting show — each year. As well as developing classy hardware, Blackmagic has been buying up software companies and giving away once exorbitantly-priced film studio software free of charge.

The first big purchase was Da Vinci, a company that made colour grading software and hardware. A system that cost six figures was rapidly re-engineered into a software-only, cross platform version called Resolve and released free of charge. A US$999 version had some additional features but the free version did everything most users needed. Within a few years the team had advanced Resolve’s editing functionality, added lots of finishing tools like title editors, and embraced audio and video plug-in support. Next to be snapped up was Fusion, one of the best VFX compositing tools. Again, within a short time a free and US$999 version hit the stunned market. 

Naturally, when Fairlight offered its IP to the open market on the 22nd of July, 2016, Blackmagic took a look. A deal was announced on the 9th of September at the start of IBC and speculation ran hot over what Blackmagic would do with the audio company.

When you consider how quickly Blackmagic has grown into a complete one-stop shop for video production — including pro software, video conversion and live streaming hardware, even developing its own professional camera range — the pace of development at its competitors appears glacial by comparison. Still, the appearance of Fairlight inside Resolve at NAB 2017 stunned even seasoned post people like me. How did they manage to integrate a professional audio workstation into Resolve in six months? 

To go behind the story of how two Aussie companies produced a mini miracle and to find out what it all means for existing Fairlight users, I spoke to Paul Saccone, Product Marketing Manager at Blackmagic Design: “The first thing we faced was getting the software across three platforms, as we were uniquely PC. I won’t go into details of what coding language we used but Fairlight’s small dedicated family of developers found themselves surrounded by Blackmagic’s big development team. Everyone was working collaboratively and basically online all day.”

AudioTechnology: It didn’t matter that Fairlight was in Sydney, and Blackmagic had teams working in Melbourne and Singapore?

BD: Wherever they might be. Blackmagic has tools that make this sort of collaboration possible. Immediately a target was set; to get Fairlight inside Resolve by NAB. From the purchase it took a couple of weeks to assess Fairlight’s IP. Choosing the architecture we would use to code across platforms took another month. By then it was October and NAB was just six months away. It was like, ‘Holy crap! How are we going to do this!’ What the team did was fabulous. Obviously it wasn’t release-ready software, but the amount of Fairlight software that went into the NAB release was extremely impressive.

AT: Blackmagic is calling it beta software and not pretending it’s the release version. I had to send a colleague in the US a copy of the Fairlight manual after he downloaded the first beta of Resolve and found very little info in its manual about the new Fairlight page.

BD: You can see the priorities. There were some more fundamental issues to be solved. For instance, when you looked at Fairlight software you saw one piece of software, but it actually consisted of modules, some of which — like FMC, the mixer control module — can be traced all the way back to the pre-2000 FAME mixing system. Over time bits were added to each module and they had to communicate back to the other modules. Certain ‘inconveniences’ that had built up in Fairlight software had to be solved. Porting all of it to Resolve would have taken months, so it was rebuilt from the ground up.

AT: Was it a chance to clear the decks and rewrite the software so it looks and functions like Fairlight but with fundamental low-level software changes?

BD: Exactly! Previously it was impossible to do clip-based audio key framing within Fairlight. We’ve also had to introduce the concept of audio FX rendering to Resolve. In the Fairlight world, user are able to perform 5.1 multi-bus mixing with over one hundred tracks, which would require 256GB of RAM if you used track-based and clip-based VST plug-ins without rendering.

There’s also multiple mains mixes in Fairlight Version 5. Not only bus to mains, but sub busses to multiple mains outputs, which is all important to different versioning.