2026
April
15th April 2026
Happy Wednesday! 👋
It's still VERY early days, but we finally have Blackmagic RAW running natively in Final Cut Pro via a Media Extension! 🥳
I still have a lot of problem solving and testing to do before this is ready for prime time, so it's entirely possible Blackmagic & Apple will release their version first, but I'm HOPING to include it in BRAW Toolbox in the not-so-distant future.
Stay tuned!
As NAB edges closer and closer, we've already started getting industry news coming out.
The big news today is that Thomas Riedel has acquired premium manufacturer ARRI. 🤯
We basically shoot 80% of our stuff on ARRI cameras - pretty much every major DOP in Melbourne has one.
The remaining 20% is probably Blackmagic Pocket's on Ronin's - so they're normally a B-camera, with an ARRI as the main - so this news hits pretty close to home!
The press release reads:
Thomas Riedel Acquires Premium Manufacturer ARRI Strategic Alignment With the Riedel Group for Innovation and Growth
WUPPERTAL / MUNICH, Germany — April 14, 2026 — Thomas Riedel, founder and owner of Riedel Communications and the Riedel Group, has acquired ARRI, the Munich-based premium manufacturer of camera and lighting technology for motion picture and live entertainment. The entrepreneur from Wuppertal was chosen in a competitive international process with his concept for a new home for ARRI, marking the largest acquisition of his career to date.
The Riedel Group is a globally recognized specialist in advanced audio, video, and data technology, delivering infrastructure solutions for many of the world’s most demanding broadcast, live event, and sports productions. Through the acquisition of ARRI, Thomas Riedel establishes a close strategic alignment between ARRI and the Riedel Group, expanding its expertise across the entire production chain — from camera optics to distribution. ARRI’s ecosystem of camera, lighting, and systems technology perfectly complements the Riedel Group’s existing portfolio and opens up new technological and strategic market opportunities for both companies.
Founded in 1917, ARRI has been family-owned ever since and is regarded as a global leader in professional film technology, having been recognized with 20 scientific and technical awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. “For more than a century, ARRI has stood for engineering excellence, innovation, and the highest quality. This success story will now continue and remain in German ownership,” said Dr. Walter Stahl, Managing Director of ARRI GmbH and member of the founding family.
Through close collaboration, ARRI and Riedel aim to unlock new areas of growth, especially in live entertainment and sports. By combining their respective technologies, the companies plan to develop integrated solutions that open new creative and technical possibilities for customers. As the first joint milestone of this collaboration, ARRI will debut its camera technology at the Eurovision Song Contest, where Riedel serves as the technology provider and NEP oversees production.
Under the new ownership of Thomas Riedel, ARRI’s existing management team will continue to lead the company and further advance its ongoing transformation. The company will retain independent operations and remain headquartered in Munich.
“Thomas Riedel has built a first-generation family business and stands for entrepreneurial continuity and long-term thinking,” said Chris Richter, Managing Director of ARRI. “We look forward to working with a successful entrepreneur and to the resulting market opportunities and access — both in existing and new markets.”
“The Riedel Group brings highly complementary technologies and extensive expertise in live production to this partnership,” added David Bermbach, Managing Director of ARRI. “This strengthens our strategic direction as a ‘Trusted Technology Leader for the Next Generation of Media & Entertainment.’”
“My entrepreneurial path has been closely tied to ARRI for years,” said Thomas Riedel. “This acquisition represents the most significant personal milestone of my career so far. I have great respect for this exceptional brand, its outstanding products, and its strong team. At the same time, I see tremendous potential and am confident that, together, we can position ARRI for long-term stability and future success.”
About ARRI: “Inspiring images. Since 1917.” ARRI is a global player within the motion picture and live entertainment industries. Named after its founders August Arnold and Robert Richter, ARRI was established in Munich, Germany, where the headquarters is still located today. Other subsidiaries are in Europe, North and South America, Asia, and Australia.
The ARRI Group consists of the business units Camera Systems, Lighting, and Rental, all dedicated to synergizing creativity and future technologies to enhance moving images and live events. ARRI is a leading designer and manufacturer with a worldwide distribution and service network. The product portfolio includes digital cameras, lenses, lighting fixtures, apps, and accessories. ARRI also offers first-class services through ARRI Rental’s provision of both standard and exclusive camera, lighting, and grip packages to professional productions around the world. ARRI’s virtual production and innovative workflows solutions boost efficiency for a broad range of studio operators, producers, and corporations. In recognition of its innovative contributions to the film and television industries, ARRI has been honored with 20 scientific and technical awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and six Engineering Emmys from the Television Academy and the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.
For locations and more information, please visit www.arri.com.
About Thomas Riedel: Thomas Riedel is a Wuppertal-based entrepreneur and innovator and the founder, 100% shareholder, and CEO of the Riedel Group. His innovative spirit and passion made him a pioneer and storyteller in the entertainment technology industry, where he has been shaping and redefining sports and entertainment formats with courage and creativity for almost four decades. In addition to his CEO duties, Thomas Riedel personally participates in numerous projects around the world as an investor, advisor, and driver of digital transformation.
About Riedel Communications: Riedel Communications is a leading provider of live production tools in the worlds of media, sports, and entertainment. The company's hard- and software solutions span from distributed video and audio networks over intercom and replay solutions to WAN and MPLS applications. Thanks to Riedel's holistic approach, its three business units — Product Division, Managed Technology Division, and Networks Division — can leverage powerful synergies to provide flexible infrastructures, tools, and services for both fixed and temporary installations around the globe, enabling Riedel customers to run even the most complex projects on-site, remotely, or in the cloud. Riedel is locally headquartered in Santa Clarita, California, with its global headquarters in Wuppertal, Germany. Riedel employs over 1,000 people in 30 locations throughout Europe, Australia, Asia, and the Americas.
Whilst I don't know a lot about Thomas Riedel, this doesn't seem like the worst news - at least ARRI is still owned by someone in the industry. Kinda sad though that ARRI's struggling.
VidCore is currently looking for TestFlight testers.
It adds .mkv support to macOS, including QuickTime and Final Cut Pro via a Media Extension.
You can read more on Reddit.
Eddie AI v3 is out now!
Shamir Allibhai writes:
We launched Eddie AI v3 today!
For the past few months we’ve been quietly working on something we’re really excited about.
It began with an idea: what if you could finish a shoot day, send Eddie your footage, and wake up to a rough cut?
Today, that idea is reality. Eddie v3 is live.
The headline feature is Night Shift: text Eddie a link to your footage in Frame.io, Google Drive, or Dropbox - literally just send it to +1 650 444 9211 and by 8am the next morning you've got a rough cut, logs, and organized media ready to open in Premiere, Resolve, or Final Cut.
It also handles B-roll placement for docu-style projects now with interview soundbites, story structure, and B-roll sequences assembled automatically.
We built Night Shift because the best time to process footage is when nobody’s awake to watch the progress bar.
Get started by texting Eddie a hello: +1 650 444 9211 Or download Eddie AI > New Project > Show All Modes > Night Shift
For those going to NAB, text Eddie NAB2026 to get a link to our party with Reddit Post Pro.
I'd love to hear what you think of Eddie v3!
Regardless of what you think of Eddie AI, we STRONGLY recommend you sign up to their newsletter, The Rough Cut - it's amazing.
You can download and learn more on the Eddie AI website.
Yet again, things have been busy in the world of SpliceKit! 🔥
The Audio Mixer has been dramatically improved. 🎚️
You can watch a demo video on YouTube:
SpliceKit v3.1.14 had the following changes:
🥳 New Features:
- All-new Audio Mixer UI: role-colored faders with gradient strips, segmented LED meters with clipping detection, per-fader automation arming, real-time volume during playback, keyframe management
SpliceKit v3.1.141 had the following changes:
🐞 Bug Fix:
- Fix Remove All Keyframes command: recursive discovery of keyframe targets across child clips, effect stacks, and audio channels
SpliceKit v3.1.142 had the following changes:
🐞 Bug Fix:
- Fix audio mixer clip discovery for nested compound clips and storylines, handle deduplication, caption panel visibility guard
SpliceKit v3.1.143 had the following changes:
🔨 Improvements
- Add song cut workflow for beat-synced video assembly from sequence-backed sources. Fix cumulative frame drift in FCPXML builds, fix connected song alignment, add half-beat pairing rule, add sequence name substring matching, resolve timeline clips to browser equivalents for native insertion.
You can download and learn more on the SpliceKit Website.
Doza Assist has also had a heap of updates.
Doza Assist v2.2.0 contains the following changes:
FCPXML Framerate Auto-Detection
- FCPXML exports now automatically detect the source media's framerate via ffprobe instead of defaulting to 23.976fps. This fixes "Invalid edit with no respective media" errors when importing into Final Cut Pro with non-23.976 footage (25fps PAL, 29.97, etc.). The Export tab dropdown also pre-selects the detected framerate.
Expanded Language Support (29 languages)
- Added Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese to the language dropdown — up from 12 to 29 languages.
Retranscribe Button:
- You can now change the language and re-run transcription on existing projects without recreating them. Open any transcribed project and click Retranscribe in the header bar to pick a new language. (#8)
Doza Assist v2.2.1 contains the following changes:
Non-English Transcription Quality:
- WhisperX was loading Whisper large-v3 with int8 quantization for speed. This is fine for English but significantly degrades quality for morphologically rich languages like Czech, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Hungarian, etc. — making transcriptions nearly unusable compared to tools like MacWhisper that use the unquantized model.
- Doza now uses float32 on CPU (matching MacWhisper's quality). Transcription will be somewhat slower but quality will be dramatically better for non-English languages.
Doza Assist v2.2.2 contains the following changes:
Non-English Transcription Now Actually Works
- v2.2.1 was supposed to fix non-English transcription quality but didn't — the real root cause was two bugs layered on top of each other:
- WhisperX was never installed in the venv (the installer only installs parakeet-mlx and openai-whisper), so the multilingual code path always failed silently and fell through to the fallback.
- The fallback used Whisper base — a tiny 74M parameter model that produces roughly phonetic gibberish for morphologically rich non-English languages (Czech, Polish, Russian, etc.).
The Fix:
- Doza now uses Whisper large-v3-turbo (1.62 GB) — the exact same model MacWhisper uses. Verified locally on a Czech test file: the output now matches MacWhisper's near-perfect transcription.
- The turbo model is a distilled version of large-v3 with 4 decoder layers instead of 32, making it ~8× faster than large-v3 while maintaining comparable quality including strong non-English support.
- First transcription after updating will download the 1.51 GB model — subsequent transcriptions use the cached copy.
You can download and learn more on GitHub.