Everything New at IBC 2026

IBC is a broadcast show. Most of what fills the RAI in Amsterdam every September is 100G switching, ST 2110 routing, and playout servers nobody reading this will ever rack. But a handful of announcements always land on the post side, and this year three of them change something on a machine you sit at. One of them will cost some of you money. I read the release notes and the pricing pages so you don’t have to, and I’ve sorted it by what you’d do about it.

TLDR

Avid’s Media Composer 2026.8 ends bin locking on third-party storage unless you pay for the Enterprise tier at $899.99 a year, so a room on EditShare, Facilis, SNS, or a Jellyfish either budgets the upgrade or stays on 2025.12. Adobe put generative video, sound effects, and music inside the Premiere timeline, and the part worth installing today is the audio beta: crosstalk separation and automatic ducking. DaVinci Resolve 21.1 is free and gives multicam editors the best edit-page update in two years, plus Inspector presets. Blackmagic cut its full-frame 6K cameras by more than $1,000. OWC bought OpenDrives, LucidLink’s Connect edits files in place from S3 and Frame.io, and every vendor in this piece shipped a hook for an AI assistant. Nothing here needs buying this month, but two of them need a decision.

Avid: the bin-locking change is the story

Media Composer 2026.8 shipped September 1 and Avid launched it properly at the show. The feature list is good. PhraseFindAI Multicam Auto Cut reads the transcript, works out who is talking, and builds an editable multicam sequence that switches angles on speech boundaries. Transcript edits can be reverted and split. The OpenTimelineIO adapter moved to 2.0, which matters the day you hand a cut to Resolve or a VFX house. And Media Composer First, the free tier, lost its track and resolution caps.

What Avid rooms are talking about instead is the storage change. Shared Projects, Avid’s name for bin locking and project sharing, now works on NEXIS from the Standard tier up, and on third-party storage only on the Enterprise tier. Before 2026.8, a shop on EditShare, Facilis, SNS, LucidLink, or a Jellyfish got bin locking on an Ultimate seat by running Hedge’s Mimiq, which makes the volume look like a NEXIS. 2026.8 blocks that emulation. Hedge’s answer is blunt: 25.12 is the last version with third-party bin locking, stay on it and nothing changes. Avid’s answer is that Enterprise now supports qualified third-party storage natively. That’s true, and it’s also $360 a year more per seat than Ultimate.

So the math for a four-seat room on an EVO or a Jellyfish is $1,440 a year to move up, or a version freeze. KeyCode Media, an Avid reseller, is quoting a $99 first-year upgrade for existing Ultimate seats; if you take it, get the year-two renewal price in writing first. The shared storage guide I wrote in August priced the Avid tier at $19,499 for an SNS EVO 8-Bay on the assumption that Ultimate plus Mimiq was the entry ticket. Read it with this change in mind: the entry ticket now includes Enterprise, or a NEXIS, or a room that never updates.

Adobe: generation moved into the timeline, and the audio beta matters more

Adobe’s release landed September 8 and the headline is the Generative Media Tool in Premiere. Select a range on any track, describe what you need, pick a model, and Premiere generates a clip in place. The model list is Firefly plus Google Veo, Kling, Runway, and Luma, and the tool samples reference frames from your own project so the generated shot matches the light and framing around it. Sound effects generate the same way, and you can use your voice to guide their timing and intensity. Soundscape and Music are marked beta, and generated music comes with sync rights. It all runs on generative credits, and the cost shows before you commit.

I’d file the generator under “a cutaway on a corporate piece when the client didn’t shoot one” and leave it there. The part of this release I’d install today is the audio beta. Enhance Audio splits a single clip into dialogue, music, ambience, and effects with a slider for each. Separate Crosstalk pulls two overlapping speakers onto their own tracks. Dynamic Auto Ducking writes the music-under-dialogue keyframes for you and rewrites them when you move the clips. That last one saves a real hour on every interview cut. All three are public beta, so run them on a duplicate sequence.

Color Mode picked up Auto Color, a Vignette module, and a Midtones module, still in beta; the Color Mode versus Lumetri versus Resolve call holds. After Effects gets its own AI Assistant in public beta, which writes expressions and reorganizes projects from a text prompt. And two Frame.io changes I’d flag to anyone paying for it. Mounted Storage is now on for every account, so a Frame.io project mounts on the desktop and streams full-resolution media into the timeline with no download. And Frame.io for teams is now sold month to month on Adobe.com through Creative Cloud for teams. It was annual only before, which is why a lot of small shops kept paying Frame.io directly.

Resolve 21.1: free, and multicam editors get the biggest gift

DaVinci Resolve 21.1 landed the week before the show, free, and the changelog runs past a hundred items. The ones that change a working day:

• Multicam is now a property of the timeline viewer instead of a separate mode, multicams can split at timecode gaps on sync, and there are angle-switch shortcuts for up to 25 angles. If you cut interviews or events, this is the biggest edit-page improvement since 19.
• The trim editor takes mouse drag and nudge, and dynamic trim is on by default.
• Inspector presets. Save a set of inspector values and apply them to another clip. The absence was a running joke.
• Media management can export a .drp at the project level, and project archive has options for stills, LUTs, and used-media-only.
• The Color page gets individual MultiMaster trims for Dolby Vision, HDR10+, and HDR Vivid, each with its own output sizing override.
• Camera support: DJI D-Gamut2 and D-Log2, GoPro Log, and Leica L-Log. HTJ2K decodes on NVIDIA GPUs, and HEIC decodes in hardware on Apple silicon.
• Fusion adds more than 25 Krokodove shape and 3D tools.
• Studio only: a native MCP server, so an AI assistant can talk to your open project. More on that below.

Resolve Studio is still $295 once, and the Studio versus free breakdown is unchanged by this release, because the free version got the multicam and trim work too. If you skipped 21 in June, the 21 piece covers what you’re stepping over.

Blackmagic cut the camera prices, and the number depends on which page you read

Blackmagic also cut its full-frame 6K bodies on September 4, and the figure you see depends on where you look. The press release says $1,595 for the Cinema Camera 6K and $1,995 for the PYXIS 6K in L or EF mount. Blackmagic’s US store, which folds import duties into the sticker, lists $1,755 and $2,245, with the PL-mount PYXIS at $2,475. Either way the cameras sit more than $1,000 under their spring prices, and Blackmagic’s stated reason is cheaper parts, not a replacement on the way. For the post side nothing changes: same 6048 x 4032 sensor, same Blackmagic RAW, same Resolve. What changes is that a BRAW A-camera now costs less than a lot of the lenses people put on it, so expect more of it on your ingest drive.

Storage: OWC bought its way upstairs, LucidLink stopped asking you to migrate

OWC bought OpenDrives on September 10. OpenDrives makes Atlas, the software-defined storage under a lot of LA post houses’ Avid and Resolve rooms, and OWC now owns it alongside Jellyfish. For anyone reading this site: Jellyfish stays the plug-in-and-edit box, Atlas becomes what OWC sells when a Jellyfish shop outgrows it, and the Jellyfish software is getting real updates on the way there. Manager 3.2 is out now with an updated Resolve integration. Connect 4 and Media Manager 3.2 land in Q4 with ProRes RAW, immersive BRAW, and REDRAW support and DPX and EXR sequence previews in the browser.

The two OWC hardware items are desk items. The Thunderbolt 5 Dock with Dual HDMI (two HDMI 2.1 ports, 140W to the laptop, 2.5GbE, a downstream TB5 port, UHS-II SD and microSD) is $349.99 in November. The current OWC Thunderbolt 5 Dock stays the pick in the dock guide until the new one has been on my desk. And there’s finally a 1.5-meter Thunderbolt 5 cable, $58.99 in mid-October, for anyone with a Studio on the floor and a monitor arm that runs the other way.

LucidLink’s news is Connect. Launched in March, Connect lets a filespace read from S3, Dropbox, and Frame.io without migrating anything. At IBC it gained edit-in-place on those connected files and a management UI, with Publish, which commits the finished file back to the source, coming later. The Python SDK and an MCP server go to general availability this month. If your archive is in an S3 bucket and your editors are on LucidLink, this removes the copy step. QNAP’s stand was the catalog it already sells; nothing there changes the server guide or the QNAP versus Synology call.

Everyone shipped an AI assistant hook, and one of them writes a real project file

Count the MCP servers in this piece: Resolve, LucidLink, and Eddie. Avid put a Google Gemini panel in Media Composer and previewed Ready to Edit, an agent that preps footage before the editor opens it. Adobe put an assistant in After Effects. MCP is the Model Context Protocol, the plumbing that lets a chat assistant call a piece of software’s functions, and this is the show where the post vendors all shipped their end of the pipe at once. You don’t have to use any of it. But if your facility has a scripting person, Resolve Studio’s server is the one to look at first, because the same release exposes transcription, multicam building, audio normalization, and render presets to the scripting API. (Python 2 support is gone in the same update, so old scripts need a port.)

The one I’d watch is Eddie AI v4. Eddie has been an assistant editor in a browser. v4 writes a native .prproj or a native .drp with bins, multicam angles, and source timecode intact, ships an Avid extension, and delivers into Premiere Productions or a Blackmagic Cloud project. Exports point at the original camera files, not proxies. It signs output with C2PA content credentials, so a broadcaster can check where the footage came from and what was done to it. Pricing is credits with no subscription, from $10 for 1,000 credits to $350 for 50,000. I haven’t cut with it and this isn’t a recommendation. I’m pointing at it because a real project file is now what an assistant has to hand you, and any tool still handing you an XML is behind.

What I’d do this month

Avid on third-party storage: don’t update past 2025.12 until you’ve priced Enterprise for every seat and read your storage vendor’s note on which version they qualify against. Avid on NEXIS, or a single seat: update, the multicam auto cut alone is worth it.

Premiere: turn on the audio beta on a duplicate of your current sequence and try Dynamic Auto Ducking on one interview. Leave the generator alone until a client asks for a shot that doesn’t exist. If you pay for Frame.io annually through Frame.io, price the month-to-month plan on Adobe.com at your next renewal.

Resolve: update, rebuild your multicam shortcuts, and save Inspector presets for the three things you apply to every clip. It’s free, and the September Macs ship the week after next if you were planning the two together.

Storage: nothing to buy. Watch for the Jellyfish Q4 release if you run one, try Connect if your archive already lives in S3, and hold the dock money until November.

And that’s it! As always, what you see here is what works for me, my clients, and my crew. IBC is a broadcast show and I read it from the edit bay; if you were on the floor and saw something I missed, leave a comment.