At its press conference yesterday, Blackmagic Design introduced 17—count ‘em—new hardware products, to go along with five software products and the three other hardware units the company introduced earlier this year.

One of the biggest pushes was fiber. Blackmagic President Dan May said that fiber solves some of the problems inherent to SDI technology, which allows cable runs only up to 300ft. Copper needs to be replaced with some frequency as well.

For those who blanche at the prospect of rewiring a whole postproduction facility with fiber, May insisted that traditionally, it hasn’t been the fiber itself that’s expensive, but the equipment. Enter Blackmagic, fulfilling its familiar role of bringing au courant technology to price points that had recently seemed unimaginable.

The new DeckLink Optical Fiber is one example of this; the capture station is available for $495, or $100 less than the DeckLink Pro with SDI I/O. It also offers SDI connectivity, just with optical fiber instead of copper. Same with HDLink Optical Fiber, the 3Gbps monitoring device for DVI and HDMI displays. $795 for the Optical Fiber version, same as copper. May said that with the long cable runs that optical fiber makes possible, HDLink OF might find homes in venues such as stadiums and houses of worship.

Of course, with that many new products at the show, it’s not all fiber for Blackmagic. The company also introduced a DVI Extender ($395) that allows facilities to send DVI content (from computer monitors, etc.) as SDI signals. “Route your computer monitor,” was how May explained it pithily.

Then there’s UltraScope, a PC-based waveform monitor with both SDI and optical fiber SDI inputs ($695). It’s a PCI Express card plus a software package that’s designed to work with any 24in. computer monitor for the display of six different scopes of signals that pass through the device. Certainly a lot to check out at the Blackmagic Design booth.