Adobe’s CinemaDNG Hopes to Solve Video Format Woes
The acronym soup of digital video formats might be a thing of the past if Adobe has its way. The company has announced a new open video format, CinemaDNG, which it hopes will do for digital video what the DNG format has done for Camera RAW.
CinemaDNG will be an open standard, free for manufacturers to implement, and, as DNG has done for images, it will improve compatibility between RAW video files from different camera manufacturers.
CinemaDNG will be developed in collaboration with camera makers like Panavision and Dalsa, as well as software vendors, with the goal of creating more streamlined video workflows and offering better options for cross-application editing.
Adobe claims the new CinemaDNG spec will offer a number of benefits to manufacturers and filmmakers — including eliminating format incompatibilities and lessening the need for proprietary tools.
While it’s nice to see Adobe working to create some new open formats (and anyone who works with video can attest to how desperately the industry needs an open video format), notable questions regarding CinemaDNG have yet to be addressed. For instance, it remains unclear whether CinemaDNG will be a capture format on popular cameras or an after-the-fact conversion tool like DNG (which still doesn’t enjoy widespread support from digital camera makers).
[Update: 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.
[Adobe Press Release. Also see Gadget Lab’s coverage.]
