The Cinema DNG Initiative has been discontinued

The Cinema DNG Initiative has been discontinued by Adobe Labs.
http://blogs.adobe.com/labs/archives/tag/cinemadng

I hope the info is wrong but if it is not, does the raw workflow for the BMCC change?

Odd that. Only yesterday I read a tweet that speedgrade was about to support it.?

[CaptainHook]

It *could* mean that it's out of the lab and in production apps.. but i dont have high hopes. I also read Adobe staff saying a while ago it wasn't in Premiere because the performance was really poor and there hadn't been much demand for it compared to other solutions.

But Cinema DNG isn't an editing format. You wouldn't cut from the DNGs any more than you would cut straight from 2k dpxs. I think that given it is an open format, this means little.

Now it´s really time for BMD und Cineform to team up!

It's an open, royalty free standard. Adobe may have started it but it is beyond them now.

Move along, nothing to see here.

Lots of Adobe Premiere Pro user comments on the Adobe CinemaDNG forum upset that it will not be included in CS6 (except for After Effects CS6). Adobe staff suggests interested people submit a Feature Request for Premiere Pro to express interest. Funny the creative ways some companies have adopted to ignore you while pretending to be listening to customers. Obviously (in my opinion) since Resolve handles CinemaDNG and it's bundled with the BMCC, then users here aren't going to carry any weight. The open format still exists but Adobe is ceding some market share to others related to support of the format they created. Not ideal but strengthens the case for workflows employing Resolve.

for resolve and bmcc users it should not matter as files can be used an will be as format is open.
maybe even bm can contribute a little into the format if they see fit.

other question is if premiere will ever support it.

but as with other cameras premiere mostly will not support them any way and you just
make proxy for editing from resolve. no brainer.

i see no point for worry.

Hello,

to support CinemaDNG is one thing,
but to offer a really good de-bayering of the information is another question;
and I mean it should be the essential here!

De-bayering basically is image-resampling (video scaling) and if You take a look at
the bad, worse ore worst quality of video scaling inside the NLEs out there,
there is nothing superior to expect from this side!

I would prefer a standardized workflow, which means
BMD could provide a SDK for de-bayering BMCC-DNGs
as RED does, so Adobe, Apple, etc. could support those with ease.

This would introduce two benefits to us:

1) high quality de-bayering as we get in Resolve,
so we avoid and spare us endless debates here at the forums like
'My app makes better images from DNGs than Yours...'
or
'If you want real highend quality out of Your BMCC you'll need to work around
five apps and three hardware converters unable for file-processing and costing $$$.$$$'.

2) consistency in quality in all apps of our workflow,
so that de-bayered BMCC-DNGs in app 'A' are 100% exactly the same as in app 'B' or 'C'


In this sense it's not too bad Adobe dropped it!

Best regards,
Bernhard

Since it is an open format, this is all much ado about nothing for us BMCC shooters or others using Cinema DNG in their workflow.

Dan
---
Daniel Bérubé
Co-Producer, SuperMeets
http://supermeet.com
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Be a Part of It. BOSCPUG
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http://boscpug.org

Reply from Adobe

1. The CinemaDNG format was previously only supported in Premiere Pro via a Labs release for 5.5. Since there were no major camera makers supporting it, we did not continue development for Premiere Pro CS6. It is included in After Effects CS6. Black Magic surprised everyone at NAB 2012 with the announcement of the camera. Our engineering team is researching what it will take to support the CinemaDNG format in Premiere Pro, but I cannot discuss if or when that will happen. Adobe is very supportive of using RAW workflows with video, and we have an excellent workflow for RED. We also just released a new beta importer for ARRI Alexa cameras on Labs.adobe.com as well. Keep checking the Labs site, and in the meantime, the After Effects workflow is the best option for CinemaDNG.

2. Davinci Resolve and Premiere Pro both work with XML files for exchanging edited sequences of video clips. The Premiere Pro team and the Davinci Resolve team worked together during the CS5.5 release to make sure that the Apple XML exchange format can work between Premiere and Davinci Resolve. For image sequences, there are still some necessary workarounds, since the XML format doesn't support image sequences, but it's still possible to work back/forth between the applications.

Adobe is notorious for deflecting blame.
To date, they are partly to blame (along with Apple) for crippling AFP/SMB (network) QT movies over 2GB (limit). Of course they blamed Apple for this and its well documented.
Adobe CS4 was the worse upgrade and they have not apologized to the creatives that had to deal with it.
So they move forward up to CS6 and still like to deflect their shortcomings.
I like forward to the BMCC and glad I picked up Resolve last year.
I can let the real apps deal with my high-end frames

The Cinema DNG Initiative has been discontinued by Adobe Labs.
http://blogs.adobe.com/labs/archives/tag/cinemadng

I hope the info is wrong but if it is not, does the raw workflow for the BMCC change?

To answer William's original question, this does not change the RAW workflow in the Blackmagic Cinema Camera.

Cheers!
Christine

That post on the Adobe Labs blog is very misleading. I wrote this to clear things up:

http://adobe.ly/QwJoMU

Thanks for the clarification, Todd! Much appreciated.

[Peter Chamberlain]

There is no problem with the CinemaDNG format for the following reasons.

• Its been planned for some time that the CinemaDNG format would be transferred into an open working group comprised of multiple companies. There are 30+ companies who are participating in this group and they will have a web site posted soon.

• CinemaDNG is really a simple addition to the standard DNG format to allow for multiple frames in a folder. That's why even Preview on a Mac, and software such as Photoshop can read the DNG frames. It's a format based on DNG still frames used on almost all high end digital still cameras for shooting RAW.

• Lots of software already supports CinemaDNG such as DaVinci Resolve. There is even a very powerful free version of DaVinci Resolve so it costs nothing to use software to read these files and to color grade them.

• Blackmagic Cinema Camera is a software based camera that can be upgraded to include multiple file formats at any time if required. If any other RAW formats come along that becomes more popular then we could support that too. However when you think about it, the CinemaDNG format is the most open format that's very easy to use and its continuing to become even more open as the CinemaDNG group works to include support in more software. It's very popular, and you can even open the frames in iPhoto because its so common!

So there is really no big issue here that we can see.

De-bayering basically is image-resampling (video scaling) and if You take a look at
the bad, worse ore worst quality of video scaling inside the NLEs out there,
there is nothing superior to expect from this side!

I would prefer a standardized workflow, which means
BMD could provide a SDK for de-bayering BMCC-DNGs
as RED does, so Adobe, Apple, etc. could support those with ease.

In this sense it's not too bad Adobe dropped it!

Best regards,
Bernhard

I don't think this is necessary.

The whole reasons DNG was chosen is that it's an open format. You don't need an SDK to debayer the image.

This is actually better, as it's then up to the USER to decide which de-bayer they LIKE. No need to be prescriptive.

Open is better than "my way or the highway"

jb

This is actually better, as it's then up to the USER to decide which de-bayer they LIKE. No need to be prescriptive.
jb

Absolutely agreed, if the choices we have will be between BETTER and BEST.
In reference to video scaling, the choices we'll get from NLEs will be between WORSE and WORST...

Best regards,
Bernhard

I just sent Adobe a feature request to implement DNG with all of their programs.
You can do this here too:
http://www.adobe.com/go/wish

I got the plug here:
http://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/2012 ... ID=4003003

It would certainly possible to get this real time in Premiere. Red does it with partial debayering which is really fast on 1/4 because it just reads in 1/4 of the resolution and debayers that.

I just sent Adobe a feature request to implement DNG with all of their programs.
You can do this here too:
http://www.adobe.com/go/wish

I got the plug here:
http://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/2012 ... ID=4003003

It would certainly possible to get this real time in Premiere. Red does it with partial debayering which is really fast on 1/4 because it just reads in 1/4 of the resolution and debayers that.

Hello,

speed is nice for editing, but it is also crucial
to request the highest possible de-bayering quality for final rendering (as RED offers).

So the de-bayering method for HQ-rendering should be at least
Variable Numbers of Gradients, at 32bit float.
But I'm convinced Adobe could do even better!

So PLEASE don't forget to also request a Maximum Quality Mode WITHOUT Compromises!

Best regards,
Bernhard

They took DNG support out of premiere because with 1/1 real time was near to impossible on most systems when doing the editing. While the rendering was still fine.
It is still available in Aftereffects and Speedgrade.

As I understand final rendering was not so much the problem here.
Is "Variable Numbers of Gradients, at 32bit float" currently not available?
If yes this part of DNG support is another request in addition to making it available again in Premiere.

Cheers

Actually I don't know what de-bayering method Adobe uses.
Tried to figure out what Lightroom does, without success.
Photographers have told that Lightroom does an excellent job!

With video scaling (technically the same) I made the experience that
ALL NLEs out there make a bad compromise in favor of performance instead of quality,
so we need to make workarounds via dedicated hardwares to get really high-end quality.

I only want to be shure that NLE vendors don't do the same again with de-bayering.

So we as cutomers need to communicate that Bilinear or Bicubic de-bayering algorithms
are nothing we would like to see in NLEs!

Among specialists it seems to be common sense, that Variable Number of Gradients
is one of the best methods.

We should encourage Adobe (and all the other NLE vendors) to give us the
VERY BEST de-bayering method without compromises for final rendering!

But:
I would still prefer a BMCC-DNGs De-Bayering SDK from Blackmagic;
- would be good for NLE vendors; could support BMCC-DNGs with ease
- would be good for us as customers; would get consistent quality in all our apps

Best regards,
Bernhard

I just updated my post about CinemaDNG with a link to the new home on the Adobe website for the specification, example files, etc.: http://adobe.ly/QwJoMU

I'd LOVE to have the raw controls found in ACR to power the initial look into a 16-bit image then do post work on the "photographic output" such as power windows etc.

ACR gives you so much control over the image and is a high quality raw processor.

Nick, that's exactly what I did for the example in the post that I just linked to. When you bring a CinemaDNG asset into After Effects, it comes through the Adobe Camera Raw plug-in. I did a severe treatment in the example just to make it obvious.

Nick, that's exactly what I did for the example in the post that I just linked to. When you bring a CinemaDNG asset into After Effects, it comes through the Adobe Camera Raw plug-in. I did a severe treatment in the example just to make it obvious.

Ahh thanks. I have a habit of missing things... Like links