CinemaDNG Natively In FCPX?

PaulG wrote: Interesting. I can't get Premiere 2015 CC to recognize anything about a DNG sequence. How are you importing them?

I think it may have to do with how the frames are named and numbered. My test clips are early BMCC clips and it could be that the naming scheme might have changed. In any case, Premiere sees those and just imports them as a single motion clip. I retested this morning with a GoPro timelapse sequence on another machine and that works a bit differently. Rather than go through the Media Browser, I used the regular import dialogue. There you get a button at the bottom of the page to enable "image sequence". Then when you select the first frame, the whole series is imported as a single motion clip.

- Oliver

That's great, Ronney! Please do let us know what you find out! I'm very excited to hear!

ronny courtens wrote: ... DNG is indeed an open source format (it's nothing more or less than an image sequence), and you can easily import and edit Cinema DNG clips in FCP X, but you won't be able to access the RAW metadata.

Wow, I've learned a lot in this thread. But I need to fully understand this last sentence from Ronny: You said that FCPX can import and edit DNG files - I tried it out and it perfectly works. Even creating a compound clip works seemlessly.

But which kind of meta data from the raw files will be lost? To me it feels like the freshly created compound clip lacks all the exposure data: Overexposed areas seem to have lost all information behind the white / and the blacks don't have details anymore. It feels more like working with jpegs!

Or is this impression incorrect and you are saying that other meta data is lost? Which meta data are you referring to?

Thanks;
Jon

FCPX can “read”Cinemas DNG files but poorly at best and treats them like JPEGs. The whole point of RAW is to access ISO, Color Temperature and other sensor data. FCPX can read other RAW formats like RedRAW but only because Red has written extensions for it. Cinema DNG, which is used by Blackmagic, only works uncompressed, not in the 3:1 and 4:1 compression settings that the Blackmagic cameras also shoot. BMD probably has little interest in helping Apple to extend FCPX to read Cinema DNG natively because it produces Davinci Resolve, which is designed to deal with the RAW workflow. The metadata that my BM Ursa Pro creates in ProRes will read into FCPX, but a Cinema DNG sequence does not contain any camera metadata like take, scene, notes etc. Nor does it sync the audio WAV file automatically. FCPX does not deal with image sequences at all, but forces users to create compound clips and put a series of stills into them setting them to 1 frame each. And it clogs up your media browser with thousands of stills instead of referring to a single image sequence, like every application does. I don’t want hear about how Apple does things differently and get over it. It’s BS and they know it.

PaulG wrote: Interesting. I can't get Premiere 2015 CC to recognize anything about a DNG sequence. How are you importing them?

Oliver Peters wrote: Premiere sees those and just imports them as a single motion clip.

If you want Premiere to recognize a CDNG folder "as a clip" the way Resolve does, you can't go over >File >Import. You have to use the - how is it called? - Media Browser in the lower left corner instead.

For FCP X to be able to interpret these folders as clips with audio Apple doesn't need the permission or co-laboration of BMD. If they did this - which they imo should - the first part of the FCP > Resolve roundtrip (now starting with Resolve to create proxies) could be skipped.

But anyone who shoots RAW wants to get the best quality possible out of every pixel, so even if FCP had a rudimentary RAW tool (as Premiere has), you'd nonetheless use Resolve for the grading.

Oliver Peters" wrote: The photo-app route is simply another alternative and in fact, probably does a better job in digging into the raw file itself.

ACR is what many used for years to develop their RAW stills. It has the tools I'm used to. Therefore I think it's the best, most intuitive asf. I actually use the HSL sliders to "grade" my stills and little else. I also found the HSL curves to be the best tool of Resolve (for my personal approach), and I'm glad FCP will have this too.

Apple’s Finder does not recognize compressed Cinema DNG from BMD, nor does ACR. They only recognize the needlessly huge uncompressed Cinema DNG format. That means Cinema DNG is not practical in either Adobe or FCPX workflows.

It is up to BMD to make its compressed CDNG spec available to Apple and it is up to Apple to support image sequences of any kind (PNG, JPEG , EXR etc.). Motion supports image sequences but not Cinema DNG compressed.

And it is up to all of us to complain to both Apple and BMD about the appalling lack of support for this format.

In the meantime, I bring my CDNG sequences into Resolve, render out ProRes dailies, and cut in FCPX. Then I round trip to Resolve for final grading and back to FCPX for final conform. It works, but it would nice occasionally to just work in FCPX with CDNG.

PaulG wrote: FCPX can “read”Cinemas DNG files but poorly at best and treats them like JPEGs. The whole point of RAW is to access ISO, Color Temperature and other sensor data. FCPX can read other RAW formats like RedRAW but only because Red has written extensions for it. Cinema DNG, which is used by Blackmagic, only works uncompressed, not in the 3:1 and 4:1 compression settings that the Blackmagic cameras also shoot. BMD probably has little interest in helping Apple to extend FCPX to read Cinema DNG natively because it produces Davinci Resolve, which is designed to deal with the RAW workflow. The metadata that my BM Ursa Pro creates in ProRes will read into FCPX, but a Cinema DNG sequence does not contain any camera metadata like take, scene, notes etc. Nor does it sync the audio WAV file automatically. FCPX does not deal with image sequences at all, but forces users to create compound clips and put a series of stills into them setting them to 1 frame each. And it clogs up your media browser with thousands of stills instead of referring to a single image sequence, like every application does. I don’t want hear about how Apple does things differently and get over it. It’s BS and they know it.

Thanks Paul! This was exactly the info I needed!!