Speaking of CinemaDNG, its creator, Adobe, has been very lukewarm in terms of support for the format. Photoshop and After Effects have always had compatibility since they can use the Camera RAW plugin, but Premiere has only had experimental support since CS 5.5. Now they have announced that they are pulling support for the CS 5.5 plugin. A recent post simply stated that the CinemaDNG initiative would be discontinued and no longer hosted on Adobe Labs. That statement has since been updated, but click through for the full explanation about what this really means for users of the Blackmagic Cinema Camera and the future of the format on Adobe's software.
Here is the full explanation of the situation:
What this is intending to communicate is simply that the experimental plug-in for CinemaDNG for Premiere Pro CS5.5 was removed from the Adobe Labs website. The CinemaDNG format continues to be an open format, and its development is not limited to Adobe. CinemaDNG files can still be opened by any current Adobe application that includes the Camera Raw plug-in for importing DNG files. This includes After Effects and Photoshop. Also, we just issued a bug-fix update for SpeedGrade that makes it work better with CinemaDNG files.
Even though more cameras are now supporting the format, Adobe doesn't see it necessary to provide support in Premiere since the marketshare is so low. As of right now, off the top of my head, three cameras are capable of outputting RAW CinemaDNG files: the Ikonoskop S16 camera, the Blackmagic Cinema Camera, and the Aaton Penelope Delta -- with plenty more on the way, like the open source Apertus Axiom 4K camera. This is part of the reasoning for not including native support in Premiere:
The answer is simply that we have not been satisfied with the performance that we have been able to achieve with CinemaDNG files in Premiere Pro, in which real-time playback is crucial. If it’s important to you that we add native import of CinemaDNG footage into Premiere Pro, please let us know with a feature request so that we can get a sense of whether this is an area where we need to put more effort.
We would certainly encourage all No Film School readers to ask Adobe for full support in Premiere, especially since so many users will be using Premiere to edit footage shot on the Blackmagic Cinema Camera. It would be very handy to have full support even without perfect full-resolution playback. We will see what the response will be like, but if Blackmagic sells enough cameras, there will be quite a vocal audience who will be shooting RAW files and want support in their editor, and since Adobe created the format, it makes sense that they have the best chance at getting a better looking result with their real-time debayering and downscaling in RAW.
You can click above or find the link below to request that Adobe include CinemaDNG support in Premiere.
Links:
[via Notes On Video]
