PP 7.1 CinemaDNG forced to video levels?

[Steve Connor]

It’s a shame, the roundtripping to Speedgrade is awesome!

Steve Connor

There’s nothing we can’t argue about on the FCPX COW Forum

[Gary Alan]

I have tried it, Eric. Everyone will have opinions on different workflows. If it works for you, then I respect that. It doesn’t for me as I would like.

Gary

[Mel Matsuoka]

[Per Holmes] “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.”

I would have to strongly disagree with this. For myself, I was eagerly anticipating the CinemaDNG support in the PP update, if only because I hoped that we could offline BMCC raw footage without having to transcode it to ProRes first. It’d be nice to be able to access the raw settings from within the PP timeline, but at the offline stage, it’s more important for us to be able to play the raw footage in any form, since the offline will get sent to me for colorcorrection anyways, it’s not really a big deal that the offline editors cant tweak the BMC footage at the raw level.

I’ve been testing the CinemaDNG offline/colorgrade/roundtrip workflow between Premiere Pro 7.1 and Resolve 10RC3, and I’m shocked to discover that it actually works (even with speed changes!). The only downside is that CinemaDNG sequences dont play out of the PP Source Viewer window though my Decklink card, but it’s still better than nothing.

I think you need to dial down your expectations of how exhaustive Adobe’s feature updates should be. It should be clear to everyone by now that their new release model is to release new updates more often, but at a more iterative pace. It’s certainly better than having to wait two years for them to release feature-complete updates, dont you think?

[Gary Alan]

Mel, I think you need to understand that not everyone works like you do. In fact, I can’t believe anyone would edit offline anymore with all the technology we have these days. We had no choice, maybe 20 years ago, to offline, but today??

It’s great that you are happy and enjoy what they give us today. But please do not tell others to lower expectations because that is what you choose to do.

[Mel Matsuoka]

[Gary Alan] “Mel, I think you need to understand that not everyone works like you do. In fact, I can’t believe anyone would edit offline anymore with all the technology we have these days. We had no choice, maybe 20 years ago, to offline, but today??

It’s great that you are happy and enjoy what they give us today. But please do not tell others to lower expectations because that is what you choose to do.
“

Gary,

I’m not telling anyone how or what they should do. If you go back and re-read the post that I was replying to, I hope you are able to see that I was offering a reasoned, contrary perspective to Per Holmes’ rather dogmatic statement that current state of PP 7.1’s raw CinemaDNG support is a “pointless non-feature”, and that access to camera-raw settings within Premiere is “the one and the only reason anyone would use RAW in the first place”. In other words, you are being the “pot” to my “kettle” by ascribing such workflow dogmatism to me.

The “offline vs. online” debate is as tiresome as “Mac vs. PC” debates. The bottom line is that if you don’t understand the need for an offline-to-online workflow, then you probably have never had a need for such a workflow in the first place. If I was a one-man-band editor who is commonly faced with single-handedly dealing with the tasks of creative editorial, colorgrading, motion-graphics, sound and final finishing, then I would be in full agreement with you and Per Holmes that the lack of ACR support significantly diminishes the usefulness of CinemaDNG playback support.

But the reason why offline/online workflows still exist (and will continue to exist for a LONG time) is due to talent, and not necessarily technology. While it’s within the realms of possibility to do everything that’s required to finish a video project from entirely within a single NLE, it’s an extraordinary rare person who possesses higher-than-average talent and experience in all of said tasks. For the type of work that I do (advertising-agency directed broadcast commercial work), the offline/online paradigm is de rigeur, because our clientele wants to work with people who specialize in the specific task they are hired for: For the same reason why you don’t ask a carpenter to fix your toilet, even though he probably owns the same tools that a plumber does.

This is why the current lack of camera raw settings access in Premiere will not be missed by our offline editors. If they need to do a quick temp grade on a shot just to boost the exposure or desaturate the image in order to drive creative-editorial decisions, they’ll almost always drop a simple 3-way color correction filter on the clip and do it that way, rather than dick around with a separate ACR window. Since I will end up removing any color correction settings they apply anyways, theres no need for them to deal with anything more complicated than that.

I wont speak for Adobe, but I would have to assume that they understand this, and as such, they are taking advantage of the software-update model of Creative Cloud in order to deliver basic––but necessary––functionality to CinemaDNG support, so as to appease people like me, who care more about realtime playback performance and workflow speed than having the ability to clumsily grade raw DNG files from an dedicated ACR window within Premiere itself. After all, what is the point of giving you access to the raw settings, if you cant even play the damn clip back in the first place?

This is what frustrates me about some of the complaints about CC. Back in the pre-CC days, people would whine and complain that Adobe wasn’t responsive to the needs of their users by not delivering needed functionality on a time scale that we wanted them in. Yet, when they decide to release the same feature requests in a more “frequently-iterative” timeframe as they are now, people still complain that they don’t deliver the things they want/need in a more feature-complete manner.

All my point was trying to make is that we should have a more rational perspective on the way Adobe is rolling these features out to us. CinemaDNG as a mainstream acquisition and editing format is in its literal infancy (the only reason why anyone cares about this format now is because of the existence and near ubiquity of the BMCC), so it stands to reason that Adobe needs time to get the feature right, and balancing basic performance and functionality vs trying to deliver a half-baked attempt at having feature parity with the ACR window in Photoshop.

[Gary Alan]

Mel, I read one sentence and I felt I had no need to read the rest of you babbling on. And I said it’s great that you are happy with what you do. I say a few meaningful sentences and you reply with five? paragraphs? LOL
I merely pointed out to you why we who shoot raw want to use it for it’s main reason, 14 bit source files. Not some offline workaround using some intermediate codec like cineform. We have been doing what you suggest for a long time now and hopefully we want to get away from those workarounds and round trips. Don’t get your panties all in a bunch.

[Mel Matsuoka]

[Gary Alan] “Mel, I read one sentence and I felt I had no need to read the rest of you babbling on. And I said it’s great that you are happy with what you do. I say a few meaningful sentences and you reply with five? paragraphs? LOL
I merely pointed out to you why we who shoot raw want to use it for it’s main reason, 14 bit source files. Not some offline workaround using some intermediate codec like cineform. We have been doing what you suggest for a long time now and hopefully we want to get away from those workarounds and round trips. Don’t get your panties all in a bunch.”

Thanks very much for the thoughtful response, Gary! Much appreciated.

[Gary Alan]

Per, does this help? I have not watched it yet.
Gary
https://vimeo.com/54754773

[Owain Hopkins]

Hello,

I too have this problem and this is the best workaround I could figure out.

1. Put ‘Black Video’ into a Premiere sequence and then ‘Replace with after effects sequence

2. When in AE, import the DNG files and place into the premiere linked sequence (I convert them to proxies because my computer isn’t very fast)

3. Go back and edit the linked sequence in Premiere. And best of all, if you need to edit the raw files, open them in Camera raw, synchronize every DNG image in a shot, save them and they should then link through to AE (after you reload the file) which in turn links through to Premiere.

Bit of a fiddle but at least it’s non destructive. Hope it makes sense?

Owain

[Mark Ford]

actually, no. that update does NOTHING to help this original issue.