CinemaDNG Initiative for Interoperability in DigitalCinema Capture

"Presenting CinemaDNG: an industry-wide initiative foran open, raw image format for digital cinematography. Capturing and editingcamera raw video in a vendor-neutral, standard format."

At Siggraph 2010, Adobe hosted a free CinemaDNG BOF session.Of the 35 attendees, about three were from Hollywood, seven CinemaDNG partners and/orpanelists, six from Adobe, and 20 Siggraph attendees.

The slides are now posted at http://www.adobe.com/go/cinemadng.

We're doing similar presentations at IBC 2010. Please come. Ask me for details.

Agenda:

-        Presentation - The CinemaDNG Initiative

-        Camera presentation - ViewPlus

-        Panel discussion - Interoperability on the Capture Side

Lars Borg, Adobe Systems, presented the CinemaDNG initiative, covering

-        Benefits and challenges of raw image workflows,

-        Processing steps for raw images,

-        Proliferation of closed formats,

-        The DNG and CinemaDNG formats,

-        Integration with Academy IIF workflows,

-        CinemaDNG status and the road ahead.

Toru Nakamura, ViewPLUS, presented the features and goals ofthe new ViewPLUS Lumiere 4K digital camera, which was demonstrated in theconference room.

The topic of our Panel Discussion was "Achieving Interoperability on the Capture Side".

Panel members were:

-        Michael Cioni, LIGHT IRON Digital (post production)

-        Steve Crouch, IRIDAS (software vendor)

-        Gary Demos, Image Essence (imaging expert)

-        Dr. Dairoku Sekiguchi, ViewPLUS (camera vendor)

-        Lars Borg, Adobe Systems (software vendor)

Highlights from the panel discussion

• Gary Demos: Non-destructive color grading on set (suchas in Adobe LightRoom) is the right approach for motion picture production. DPsalready use these tools on set, but the post applications do not use themetadata. This should be pursued in the Academy IIF framework, in conjunctionwith the ASC Tech Committee subcommittees working on ASC CDL 3.0.
• Ray Feeney, RFX: A compelling reason for adoptingCinemaDNG would be if CinemaDNG provided an integrated look managementworkflow. To further strengthen adoption, the group should provide plug-ins forleading DI applications.
• Haarm-Pieter Duiker, Duiker Research: OpenColorIO couldbe the cross-platform color engine for this.
• Gary Demos: There may be value in a core"light" file engine for key attributes of OpenEXR's half-float, TIFF 8/16/32,and DPX 10bit. A concept like "dng converter + dng validate" could beused to expand and interoperate (via conversion) the core set of supportedformats into all of the variants (like DPX 12/16, or tiled OpenEXR). Asimplified "most popular" subset could be part of a common code base,with various TIFF-tag-subset, OpenEXR-header, and DPX-header attributes(hopefully a single unified variant of all of these).

Contact info for our Panelists and Presenters

Michael Cioni, Founder,CEO
LIGHT IRON Digital
p: +1 310.559.5400
c: +1 323.428.6767
michael@lightirondigital.com

Steve Crouch, Director
IRIDAS Americas
steve@iridas.com
+1 818.259.1202

Gary Demos
Image Essence LLC
garydemos@sbcglobal.net
+1 310.383.2201

Toru Nakamura, ProgramManager
ViewPLUS
tn@viewplus.co.jp
+81-80-3366-1394

Dairoku Sekiguchi,Research Lab Director
ViewPLUS
dairoku@viewplus.co.jp
+81-90-8807-5143

Lars Borg, Principal Scientist
Adobe Systems
borg@adobe.com
+1 408 536 2723