Working with DNG Camera Profiles

The Digital Negative or DNG is Adobe's royalty-free, open standard archival format for the RAW files generated by digital cameras. DNG helps ensure that photographers will be able to access their files in the future, as well as features like sharing visual styles across multiple cameras.

There's support for this file format among major players in imaging, and Adobe provides support in some apps along with a Profile Editor to create new styles or looks. A backgrounder, The DNG Profile Editor: What's it all about?, was posted last year on John Nack's blog. Just a month ago Adobe issued a new version of the spec, which was discussed at Digital Photography Review in DNG updated to allow RAW corrections and Unless otherwise specified: DNG gains lens corrections.

Moving images are a big of this future, and last year Adobe announced CinemaDNG with "plans to support the CinemaDNG format in future releases of After Effects and Premiere Pro." This year Adobe Lightroom Product Manager Tom Hogarty mentioned that Lightroom might get some kind of video support. Also, CinemaDNG got support from camera maker Ikonoskop, codec engineers Cineform, and Iridas, maker of color correction software (see the interview from NAB 2009). Having a non-modal 'AdobeCine' Develop Module in AE and Premiere should be nice, especially when complemented by tools from On Location or Color Finesse (which has its own Looks deep inside Plug-ins > Effects).

Nudging us into the future now is Julieanne Kost, who explains Working with DNG Camera Profiles on Adobe.TV (fullscreen):



"In this Episode, learn how to take advantage of the new Adobe Standard and Camera Matching DNG Camera Profiles in Lightroom 2 and Photoshop CS4. Discover how to best use and apply profiles by: customizing your default settings, synchronizing settings between images, and/or creating presets and applying them upon import — all that and more will be covered as we unlock the secrets of Camera Profiles." (via John Nack)

Update: There's now a CinemaDNG Importer for After Effects and Premiere to read CinemaDNG video streams in the form of MXF files and DNG file sequences. It supports After Effects CS4 and Premiere Pro CS4 on both Mac and Windows systems.

Lightroom and video

From Twitter's 5tu (Stu Maschwitz, who proposed a Universal Color Metadata format in 2007):

"@TheLightroomLab Tom Hogarty [Adobe’s Lightroom Product Manager] mentions in this interview that Lightroom might get some kind of video support: http://bit.ly/15BEE3"

Let's hope the Lightroom team talks to video/film people seriously, and borrows from the ease-of-use of Magic Bullet Looks and from others for secondaries and such, or at least bathes a bit with The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction by Steve Hullfish.

And someday we may also see something like Lightroom's Develop Module in After Effects. About a year ago Adobe announced CinemaDNG, which got coverage from Wired:

'Adobe Product Manager for After Effects, Michael Coleman, tells Wired.com that “Adobe is working with the camera manufacturers to design the format to ensure that it can be used as a capture phase.” Coleman says that the company believes that “would be the ideal workflow,” and also added that Adobe is “planning a conversion solution for cameras that don’t support it.”

While CinemaDNG is theoretical for the moment, and Adobe hasn’t set a timeframe for it’s release, the company did say that it plans to support the CinemaDNG format in future releases of After Effects and Premiere Pro.'

Red R3D support soon in AE & Pr CS3

Yesterday's news... on the RED forum by Jim Jannard, founder and backer of the RED Digital Cinema:

"Within a week, RED R3D files will open natively in CS3 Premiere Pro and After Effects."

This effort is led by RED and it's not known how the current Premiere width limit of 4096 pixels will be handled before the next Adobe release. Some CS4 apps are already on Adobe Labs, so the next versions of AE & Pr are not that far off.

If you're in San Francisco on August 5, the Digital Cinema Society Northern California Chapter examines workflows for both the Sony XDCAM EX and RED One Cameras. Adobe will present their native XDCAM EX (and presumably RED) editing workflow using Production Premium software and give the latest details on their Cinema DNG initiative. Other featured presenters include Adam Wilt and Art Adams who will share some of their findings after rigorous tests of these cameras and workflows.

The group plans to meet at Adobe in San Francisco; send the required RSVP to Trudi@DigitalCinemaSociety.org.

Adobe announces CinemaDNG +more

An AdobeCine app and a new CSX wide color model would be cool...

Adobe "today announced that it plans to lead an initiative to define an industry-wide open file format for digital cinema files to streamline workflows and help ensure easy archiving and exchange. Adobe intends to leverage its successful Digital Negative Specification (DNG) file format as a foundation, and Adobe plans to work with a broad coalition of leading camera manufacturers, including Panavision, Silicon Imaging, Dalsa, Weisscam, and ARRI—along with software vendors, including Iridas and The Foundry, and codec provider CineForm—to define the requirements for an open, publicly documented file format that it plans to call CinemaDNG."

And from Wired: 'Adobe Product Manager for After Effects, Michael Coleman, tells Wired.com that “Adobe is working with the camera manufacturers to design the format to ensure that it can be used as a capture phase.” Coleman says that the company believes that “would be the ideal workflow,” and also added that Adobe is “planning a conversion solution for cameras that don’t support it.”

While CinemaDNG is theoretical for the moment, and Adobe hasn’t set a timeframe for it’s release, the company did say that it plans to support the CinemaDNG format in future releases of After Effects and Premiere Pro.'

Sounds like a good idea, and I hope it can even go beyond a bit into the Stu Maschwitz idea of a Universal Color Metadata format:

Update: CNET adds, "Separately, Adobe will give a preview at NAB 2008 of technology that automatically transcribes the audio track of a video file. For editors, this will allow them to more quickly find passages within a clip based on a text read-out of the audio. The output of the video-editing software will also include that transcribed information.

As a result, viewers of a Web video will be able to search on terms to find a specific location within a video. For example, a person could search a CNET video review for a product name and a specific feature, such as camera zoom. Adobe will demonstrate the feature on a version of its Soundbooth audio-editing product under development and on Premiere Pro... The transcription information will be stored in XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform), another format developed by Adobe. 'We keep saying that metadata is the most important thing happening in our industry and we want to prove it,' said Hayhurst.

In other announcements, Adobe will announce that it is now natively supporting Sony's XDCAM EX tapeless video file format in its Creative Suite 3 video-editing tools."