Adobe discontinues support for CinemaDNG on Premiere Pro.

 
We have watched this comparison test between Blackmagic’s Cinema Camera (4:2:2 10-bit image), and Canon’s 5D Mark III (4:2:0 8-bit image) way too many times.

 

And here’s a low-light comparison between Sony’s FS100 and Blackmagic. We believe the footage speaks for itself.
 

We are seriously considering getting Blackmagic’s amazing camera next month when it finally becomes available. Because of this, we are extremely surprised and dissapointed by Adobe’s sudden decision to drop support for their own CinemaDNG format on Premiere Pro. CinemaDNG is one of the many features we really like from the Blackmagic Cinema Camera. This is Adobe’s statement:

“The Cinema DNG Initiative has been discontinued and is no longer hosted on Adobe Labs. 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 (note: which is NOT the case fro Adobe Premier Pro) for importing DNG files.”

Right after our NAB 2012 wrap-up report (where we highlighted Blackmagic’s Camera AND the announcement of Adobe Premiere Pro CS6) Adobe had this to say:

“So far we have received very little interest from our users for CinemaDNG. The BlackMagic camera surprised us at NAB as much as it surprised anyone. If we find that a lot of people are using that camera and are asking us to natively import CinemaDNG files in Premiere Pro, then we’ll look into it.
For now, you can import CinemaDNG files into After Effects through the Camera Raw plug-in, which comes with After Effects. The performance is very poor, though, which is one of the reasons that we haven’t been moving forward with CinemaDNG in Premiere Pro.”

So, clearly, either Adobe couldn’t improve the performance or simply didn’t allocate enough resources to do it. We believe that many filmmakers and photographers transitioning into digital cinema will be using Adobe Premiere Pro to edit footage shot on Blackmagic’s Cinema Camera. Not only Adobe created the format, but it doesn’t seem like a vote of confidence for the many photographers who have switched to a DNG Lightroom workflow,because it seemed like a better “future proof” alternative. 

If you have a LOT of free time, check Phillip Bloom’s review of Blackmagic’s Cinema Camera which includes post grading in Photoshop using Adobe Camera Raw. 

What do you think? Do you care?