The Daily Aus takes its news to social media with Blackmagic

Блэкмэджик Дизайн cameras and switchers, as well as DaVinci Resolve software, enable The Daily Aus to broadcast its content on social networks such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and various podcast channels.

The Daily Aus is one of the first news services in the world to produce stories exclusively for social media channels, which involves a significant audio-visual component. The service currently has a reach of 1.3 million Instagram accounts per month and hundreds of thousands of subscribers on each of its platforms.

To produce his content, Joe Kiely, head of AV production at The Daily Aus, decided to go with Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K G2 units and ATEM Mini Extreme ISO switchers, which are used both in his Sydney studio and for external coverage: “The Pocket cameras are fantastic as they are small and compact, but pack a punch in terms of image quality. (…) We’ve taken the cameras deep into the Daintree rainforest, out onto the Great Barrier Reef, and underneath Sydney’s suburbs into the sewer network. Due to the camera’s small form factor, we’ve been able to move quickly while capturing these news stories in a cinematic way.”

The use of the ATEM Mini Extreme ISO switcher is also key to their day-to-day operation, as with this equipment “we have been able to eliminate the plugging in and moving around of many SD cards and hard drives, as well as control and adjust the visual look across 3 cameras from our main studio computer, and even use the 2nd HDMI out on the ATEM to give our presenter a feed on a monitor to check ‘last looks’ before rolling. We can then record our video podcast promos and longer form sit down interviews in isolated files from our cameras directly into the ATEM – and even switch on the fly. It makes multi-cam editing a breeze,” says Kiely.

Post-production with DaVinci Resolve

The editing process of the pieces, a collaborative phase in which there are different stages of change reviews and approvals, is carried out with Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve. But it wasn’t always that way, Kiely confesses: “We’ve got a good system in place now, and most recently we incorporated TikTok videos into the equation. Our multimedia journalist was producing the video content strictly on her phone and getting quite frustrated with the workflow, particularly actioning feedback, replacing shots and sharing work-in-progress edits. I trained her up to edit her TikTok videos on Davinci Resolve and it’s been a game changer. We can now collaborate and turn the videos around much quicker, share edits for approval and have other editors working remotely on the same projects if the workload is piling up.”

To facilitate the post-production process, and thus be among the first to get their stories onto social media, Kiely and his team have opted for the Blackmagic RAW codec. Kiely says: “We have been using Blackmagic Raw for filming in unpredictable lighting situations, or when recording on green screen in order to capture the highest resolution possible for keying. We have had huge success with traditionally difficult images such as hair or fine edges. We recently filmed underground where the lighting constantly changed from very low to mixed sources. We captured in B.Raw to give us flexibility in post production to achieve a consistent look for all the environments we were in.”