Fremont, CA — December 6, 2017 - Blackmagic Design today announced that Blackmagic URSA Mini Pro and DaVinci Resolve Studio were used for popular singer Kana Nishino’s new music video for her song “Girls.” Nobu Sueyoshi both directed and shot the video, and Toru Miura, a colorist and DIT from Spice Inc., provided color correction.

Kana Nishino is a Japanese female singer and song writer who has received a number of music awards in Japan. Her latest single, “Girls,” is a song designed to cheer all women up. To capture that feeling, the music video shows Kana Nishino walking down the streets of Tokyo and also includes close ups of her singing with a beautiful sunset light and flare, giving a very soft and warm look.

“I rather prefer a look which is kind of low contrast and soft, and not too much of a high contrasty and crisp image. I knew that Blackmagic’s camera was good for shooting the image of my style, which is why I chose URSA Mini Pro. The camera has a built in ND filter which allowed me to shoot more easily. Also, the swappable mount is a great advantage as I wanted to use anamorphic lenses, so I needed a PL mount,” said Sueyoshi.

The URSA Mini Pro was used with Vantage Film’s Hawk V-Lite anamorphic lens with PL mount. “I used the anamorphic lens to get the soft image but using that kind of lens could sometimes look like it’s not focused right. However, the URSA Mini Pro can provide the soft image we want from the lenses, yet what we want to focus on is beautifully sharp.”

The look Sueyoshi aimed for with the music video was neutral, yet not too dark in the shadows. He used a LUT which Miura, who also participated in shooting as a DIT, had created using DaVinci Resolve. Miura said: “The URSA Mini Pro was used for the close-up shots of the singer with a sunset in the background. The LUT I created in Resolve has some yellow tone in the highlights which gives a creamy look. I basically kept the tone for the final grading. We shot everything in RAW; uncompressed RAW for normal speed and 3:1 compressed RAW for 60 fps high speed shooting. The other camera we used also records RAW footage, so it was easier to match the two cameras’ footage. I used Resolve’s Lightbox display to see thumbnails of all the shots in the timeline on a screen. It allowed me to check the color balance of shots on a single monitor quickly, which was a big help especially when I couldn't spend too much time for grading.”

“Also for this project, I was unable to use our DaVinci Resolve system at Spice, and had to work in different facility. The render cache feature in Resolve helped me a lot to work on a less powerful system,” Miura said.

Miura continued: “I used many trackers to brighten up the face tone. The URSA Mini Pro captures images which has more details than the other camera we used for this project. It sometimes may give you too much detail if you deal with female skin tones, so I used noise reduction to smooth out the skin tones.”

“The URSA Mini Pro is affordable yet captures a beautiful image. It means I could invest more of the budget for lenses while still allowing me to obtain the look I was aiming for,” concluded Sueyoshi.

Press Photography

Product photos of the Blackmagic URSA Mini Pro 4.6K, DaVinci Resolve Studio and all other Blackmagic Design products, are available at www.blackmagicdesign.com/media/images

About Blackmagic Design

Blackmagic Design creates the world’s highest quality video editing products, digital film cameras, color correctors, video converters, video monitoring, routers, live production switchers, disk recorders, waveform monitors and real time film scanners for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries. Blackmagic Design’s DeckLink capture cards launched a revolution in quality and affordability in post production, while the company’s Emmy™ award winning DaVinci color correction products have dominated the television and film industry since 1984. Blackmagic Design continues ground breaking innovations including 6G-SDI and 12G-SDI products and stereoscopic 3D and Ultra HD workflows. Founded by world leading post production editors and engineers, Blackmagic Design has offices in the USA, UK, Japan, Singapore and Australia. For more information, please go to www.blackmagicdesign.com.