So you used to edit in Final Cut and then jumped ship to the hot shinny new hipster toy called Adobe Premiere Pro 6, and you want that Blackmagic Cinema Camera so bad don’t you? Or perhaps your’e thinking about filming with any one of a number of new cameras coming out that allow the option of recording your footage in CinemaDNG. Your workflow all sorted then? Shoot on the BMCC/ikonoskop/Digital Bolex/KineRAW/Weisscam and copy the uncompressed RAW images in CinemaDNG format files into Adobe Premiere Pro for an edit session, pump out the video to Vimeo and wait for the pats on the back, right.
Noooooooo?? Right about now you find out that CinemaDNG does not edit in Premiere Pro natively.

From Todd Kopriva one of the Adobe team members:

We got 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.

When pushed as to why an Adobe product like CinemaDNG would not work straight out of the box in Premiere Pro, Todd replied:

I think that you’re over-estimating how much the format is “our” format. We did some early work on the format and then made it an open-source format for others to develop as they saw fit. We didn’t push it and don?t intend to do so, any more than we would for any other open standard. It has received very little uptake, with only a couple of recent exceptions.
In the meantime, many competing formats have been taken up with great success, and we need to focus our limited resources on making sure that formats that are already very popular are supported as well as possible.

So double up on your storage space and take the phone off the hook, as you just lost money to thirsty double handling Gigabytes and any spare time you ever had just to edit a very simple file.

Well one way to save the day for now if you still want to use Adobe to edit CinemaDNG, is by adopting a workflow set out by Theo Lipfert:

If you really require your newly bought CinemaDNG capable camera to work in Premiere Pro then send Adobe a brief note letting them know just that. The more people that write to Adobe asking for CinemaDNG to work in Premiere Pro natively the quicker it might just happen.

Fill out the Adobe Wish List to get your request heard.

Also download CinemaDNG Workflow from Adobe to help you with your editing process.

If you like the After Effects to FCP route instead of Premiere then try this CinemaDNG workflow by Billy from Art War Entertainment:

If Adobe is not your first choice for editing CinemaDNG then try a FCP and Resolve workflow thanks to Decoy studios:

Of course if you do buy the Blackmagic Cinema Camera then happy happy joy joy it comes with DaVinci Resolve free of charge.
You may also like to try CineForm, MXF4MAC, DanCad3D, and course try Adobe LightRoom, to de-Bayer the DNG frames with colour correction and save the frames into other file formats such as ProRes for use with Adobe Premiere Pro.

Enjoy!

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