April 14, 2008

Adobe announces CinemaDNG +more

An AdobeCine app and a new CSX wide color model would be cool...

Adobe "today announced that it plans to lead an initiative to define an industry-wide open file format for digital cinema files to streamline workflows and help ensure easy archiving and exchange. Adobe intends to leverage its successful Digital Negative Specification (DNG) file format as a foundation, and Adobe plans to work with a broad coalition of leading camera manufacturers, including Panavision, Silicon Imaging, Dalsa, Weisscam, and ARRI—along with software vendors, including Iridas and The Foundry, and codec provider CineForm—to define the requirements for an open, publicly documented file format that it plans to call CinemaDNG."

And from Wired: 'Adobe Product Manager for After Effects, Michael Coleman, tells Wired.com that “Adobe is working with the camera manufacturers to design the format to ensure that it can be used as a capture phase.” Coleman says that the company believes that “would be the ideal workflow,” and also added that Adobe is “planning a conversion solution for cameras that don’t support it.”

While CinemaDNG is theoretical for the moment, and Adobe hasn’t set a timeframe for it’s release, the company did say that it plans to support the CinemaDNG format in future releases of After Effects and Premiere Pro.'

Sounds like a good idea, and I hope it can even go beyond a bit into the Stu Maschwitz idea of a Universal Color Metadata format:

Update: CNET adds, "Separately, Adobe will give a preview at NAB 2008 of technology that automatically transcribes the audio track of a video file. For editors, this will allow them to more quickly find passages within a clip based on a text read-out of the audio. The output of the video-editing software will also include that transcribed information.

As a result, viewers of a Web video will be able to search on terms to find a specific location within a video. For example, a person could search a CNET video review for a product name and a specific feature, such as camera zoom. Adobe will demonstrate the feature on a version of its Soundbooth audio-editing product under development and on Premiere Pro... The transcription information will be stored in XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform), another format developed by Adobe. 'We keep saying that metadata is the most important thing happening in our industry and we want to prove it,' said Hayhurst.

In other announcements, Adobe will announce that it is now natively supporting Sony's XDCAM EX tapeless video file format in its Creative Suite 3 video-editing tools."

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