Adobe seeks to unify digital video formats with CinemaDNG

San Jose (CA) – Video editors and cameramen have often dealt with an alphabet soup of file extensions and codecs, but Adobe hopes to change all that with their CinemaDNG iniative. The company hopes major video camera companies and codec firms will unite to support a single digital RAW format to be used during the capture portion of the video creation workflow.

Adobe argues that the dozens, if not hundreds, of different video formats complicate and slow video creation. We at TG Daily have first-hand experience with this problem as we capture video on both Final Cut and Sony Vegas-equipped computers. Video files captured in Final Cut sometimes can’t be used in Vegas (something to do with the .mov wrapper that Final Cut insists on adding to captured files).

Adobe says it has garnered the support of popular video companies like ARRI, Panavision and Cineform, but it’s unknown if the CinemaDNG format will take off because many companies make substantial sums of money from selling broadcast/movie-quality codecs. These codecs can sometimes cost tens of thousands of dollars and it’s difficult to see those companies giving up that kind of money.

The CinemaDNG initiative follows Adobe’s success in somewhat unifying digital camera standards with its DNG format for still pictures. Adobe offers a free DNG converter that will often losslessly compress various camera RAW formats into a .DNG file. The resulting files are often 20% to 40% smaller and open up inside of Adobe’s Camera RAW application inside of Photoshop. We’ve been using the Adobe DNG converter for more than a year now on all of our Canon CR2 RAW images and so far have had no problems.