-
PP 7.1 CinemaDNG forced to video levels?
Hi,
I just got the new Premiere Pro 7.1, and excitedly started testing the CinemaDNG workflow, and I’ve hit a massive wall. It appears that Premiere Pro uses only part of the latitude of the RAW format, there’s apparently no way to change it, and it’s apparently suddenly impossible to access the full tonal range of RAW, even with Speedgrade or After Effects.
As an example, I have some footage with burnt out clouds. If I open a DNG image in Photoshop or After Effects, I can edit the exposure upon import, and bring back all the latitude on the clouds. That’s the whole point of using RAW.
In Premiere Pro, CinemaDNG seems cropped to video levels, and I can’t bring back any information in the highlights. I simply turn down blotchy over-exposed highlights.
If I take the sequence over into SpeedGrade, it’s the same. I’m not able to pull any information out of the clouds, only reduce the brightness of already blotchy over-exposed clouds.
If this really is designed this way, what the heck is the point? The ONLY, I feel I can safely repeat, ONLY reason to shoot RAW is to be able to access the full tonal range of the image. But Premiere Pro seems to crop the latitude range to a video range.
But then there’s no point in shooting CinemaDNG, and not simply shoot ProRes.
What am I getting wrong? Or what in the world are the designers thinking here, killing the one and the only reason anyone would use RAW in the first place?
Further, it appears that it’s not even possible to “upgrade” to full CinemaDNG. If you’ve imported CinemaDNG in Premiere Pro, the manual says that the clip will be locked to that tonal range, even as you bring it over into SpeedGrade, which I’ve confirmed.
I can’t figure it out. If this is true, CinemaDNG playback is an completely pointless non-feature.
What the heck?
Per
-
21 Replies
-
What we are releasing it the initial support and playback of CinemaDNG. We know it is missing the RAW settings. What we did is create a ground up performant playback engine for CinemaDNG that we can continue to develop on. After Effects still has the Camera Raw style plugins.
Cheers
Dave———————————————————————————————————
David McGavran, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Senior Engineering Manager Adobe Premiere Pro
——————————————————————————————————— -
This falls along with the question I just posted here earlier. I was hoping to get ACR and adjust dng raw files in PPro. No on so far has an answer and the pre press was all over on how the new update would be able to use DNG. I was importing DNG into PPro before this update. I feel they did some fancy talking/hyping about this new update. I hope Adobe or someone has some better answers and solutions.
Gary
-
ahhhhh, continue to develop. well I guess that explains it all. now we all can go back to where we were and MAYBE someday they will catch up with modern technology.
-
Hi,
I have to admit that this is a curveball for me. I’ve actually checked for upgrades 5 times a day since October 15, and suddenly, it’s dead on arrival.
The marketing didn’t mention anything about this. This is kind of a mega deal-breaker, since the only reason anyone would use RAW in the first place would be to access the full tonal range.
But why have you locked it out completely to access the tonal range? All you’d have to do in SpeedGrade is give the ability to upgrade the clip to non-real-time rendered footage that accesses the full tonal range. I think anyone who uses CinemaDNG would happily pay that non-real-time sacrifice until it one day becomes real-time.
But instead, you’ve designed it to stay forever locked into the arbitrary video tonal range that Premiere auto-decided on import, with no possibility of changing it, not even in SpeedGrade.
I think this defies logic a little bit. You’ve done all this amazing work to make CinemaDNG play in real-time, but then you’ve disabled the one thing that would make anybody use it.
The CinemaDNG workflow is a complete non-starter for me. I’m already done with it. I’m exploring the Ginger workflow, perhaps there’s something there. But the 7.1 CinemaDNG workflow I simply can’t find anything to use for.
Believe me, I love your software otherwise, I’ve converted away from Avid MC because Premiere in general is more powerful. But this CinemaDNG workflow is perplexing. I’m way bummed.
Best,
Per
-
We understand your frustration and are continuing to work hard on this. Getting correctly debaryed GPU accelerated CinemaDNG was quite a success for us. Adding the options is now possible.
Cheers
Dave
———————————————————————————————————
David McGavran, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Senior Engineering Manager Adobe Premiere Pro
——————————————————————————————————— -
That’s bad news, I was looking forward to using PPro to work on our Blackmagic RAW shoots?
Steve Connor
There’s nothing we can’t argue about on the FCPX COW Forum
-
Have you looked at just importing to AE for Raw changes and then export to Cineform for Premiere work? You can also just convert to Cineform Raw in the first place.
Eric-ADK
Tech Manager
support@adkvideoediting.com -
Hi,
I have terrible news. I just tested “replace with After Effect Composition”, and it doesn’t work for CinemaDNG.
This means that there is no way whatsoever to access the RAW tonal range of CinemaDNG imported into Premiere Pro. No way at all.
This blows my mind. I’m not completely convinced that Adobe understands why anyone shoots RAW.
Editing CinemaDNG in Premiere Pro/SpeedGrade is functionally the same as if you had shot the whole thing as ProRes to begin with.
Yikes. Well, CinemaDNG in 7.1 is dead and buried. Does anybody have experience with the Ginger workflow?
Per
-
not the same. go over there, then over there and maybe back here and end up with something less quality that won’t grade properly. no thank you. plus, add up all the extra time involved and imagine how horrendous that would be on a whole project. heck, imagine how much extra time is then needed to do just a scene with multiple takes.
as others feel. like I do, on how we expected to import raw dng files, 14 bit with a larger DR, do a first pass with ACR (where is the ACR pop up on import like expected??), edit then a final grade “using the original 14 bit raw source files”.
-
I have done differential tests with DNG to Cineform and the difference is negligible. The conversion to Cineform is extremely quick if you don’t need to bring into AE first. Maybe go try it and see first? I know 1 person was already reporting how nice it was in another forum here.
Eric-ADK
Tech Manager
support@adkvideoediting.com
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up