BYUtv Grades More than 100 Shows and 500 Promos Per Month Using DaVinci Resolve Studio

Blackmagic Design has announced BYUtv, part of Brigham Young University, one of the world’s largest college broadcasters, is using DaVinci Resolve Studio and DaVinci Resolve Advanced Panel and Resolve Mini Panels for color correcting and grading an average of 150 shows and promotions each month. DaVinci Resolve Studio is being used in BYUtv’s three 4K grading rooms located at BYU Broadcasting, on the school’s Provo, Utah campus. 

Founded in 2001, BYUtv has grown from a relatively unknown cable channel on a single satellite TV provider to coverage in more than 54 million households on Dish Network, DirecTV, and 152 cable systems in the United States. BYUtv also offers live HD TV and on demand programming via its digital platform, which includes apps for iOS, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Chromecast, Xbox One, and Windows Mobile. 

Each month, BYUtv’s Post Production and Graphics Manager, Todd Bowen, is faced with providing a full post production workflow for a huge number of shows and promos. These shows include the global hit sketch comedy show “Studio C,” which has more than 1.7 Billion YouTube views, the popular “Relative Race” reality show, and more than 150 live sports events every year, including a daily sport show, BYU Sports Nation. 

“Our post production team includes 16 full time employees and up to 80 student employees. BYUtv’s post production workflow is built so that we can put out a huge amount of high quality, family friendly content every month. There is a level of expectation that a BYUtv show will look as good as anything you can see on the highest budget TV show, and Resolve is a core part of making that happen,” Bowen said. 

Bowen uses dozens of seats of DaVinci Resolve in the studio’s three 4K color rooms, with a DaVinci Resolve Advanced Panel for grading, and also uses DaVinci Resolve Studio as part of a conforming stations. Each room provides color, LUT building for the various shows, creating proxies and the ability to match cameras and dial up looks for the huge number of different cameras and sources. The software is also used in a DIT kit for ingesting on many of the station’s remote productions. 

“Our Resolve workflow is used for a little bit of everything. One station could be grading a trailer for a new scripted fantasy TV series “Dwight in Shining Armor”, while another is grading promos for a reality show such as Relative. Each have distinctly different looks and footage types. Resolve is able to handle it all, and its ability to retain meta data when creating proxies makes everything much easier to manage,” Bowen continued. 

“A great example of how we use Resolve is with our sketch show Studio C. That show has tens of millions of followers, and we have to deal with finishing from a variety of different sources. And within the show itself, we have completely different looks with each sketch. The Harry Potter sketches are completely different looking than the Raiders of the Lost Ark ones, etc. Resolve lets us easily build and manage the various LUTs so we are quickly ready for whatever sketch we have to jump into, which is a huge advantage since at any given time we will be jumping from one project to another,” he said. 

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 towww.blackmagicdesign.com.