DailyTech - Adobe Pushes for Open Digital Cinema File Format

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IT Adobe Pushes for Open Digital Cinema File Format
Shane McGlaun (Blog) - April 15, 2008 6:31 AM

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14 comment(s) - last by Justin Case.. on Apr 15 at 11:03 PM

Adobe says the new format will make it easier to create digital cinema files and reduce incompatibilities

Adobe is a well known company within the video and image editing and authoring realm as the maker of some of the most popular software products around for these tasks like Photoshop and Premier Pro. Adobe announced this week that it was kicking off an effort at the National Association of Broadcasters 2008 show to define an industry wide open-file format for digital cinema files.

The format will be called CinemaDNG and will be based on Adobe’s existing Digital Negative file format used for digital photography. Simon Hayhurst, senior product manager for dynamic media at Adobe says, “The DNG format is used in the photographic world today; it enables you to get as close as you can to a digital negative.”

Hayhurst continues, “We knew we needed to work with the industry on this and we decided that NAB would be a good place to kick this off.” Adobe says that the open CinemaDNG format will allow filmmakers to avoid incompatibilities in workflow that involve multiple devices, file formats and vendors.

Hayhurst also says that the CinemaDNG format will allow metadata to be embedded into the files to make post-production work easier and allow audiences to search content easily. The metadata will also provide a way for advertisers to target content for advertising. Hayhurst says that the ability to leverage the metadata in content via Adobe’s recently announced Media Player will do for video what HTML did for text rendering.

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good move, but...

By Gul Westfale on 4/15/2008 9:08:16 AM , Rating: 2

maybe this can do for digital video what mp3 did for music files, meaning creating a format that everyone knows and that everything is compatible with. on the other hand, if it is based on proprietary adobe tech then there might be some resistance from other parties.

on another note: i DLed the adobe media player, very nice looking, lots of free content... but none of it will play. all i get is 30 second clips of literally nothing. searching around online i found that i'm not the only one having problems with it... is there an update coming?

RE: good move, but...

By FITCamaro on 4/15/2008 9:21:49 AM , Rating: 4

Exactly. Adobe is hardly a company known for its open formats.

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RE: good move, but...

By Visual on 4/15/2008 9:53:54 AM , Rating: 2

and besides, we already have vc1 and h264
they may not be as "open" as may be desired - implementors should in theory pay a licensing fee - but they are the de-facto standards and enough free implementations exist already.
there is absolutely no reason for a new format.

besides, adobe is talking pure gibberish when they called their format "digital negative"... that sounds completely absurd.

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RE: good move, but...

By omnicronx on 4/15/2008 10:11:21 AM , Rating: 2

quote:
and besides, we already have vc1 and h264

Its a cinema file format, not for personal use. They are trying to create an open format for tv broadcasters and movies studios(or whoever else would like to do video editing). I assume this is also either a lossless codec, or the next closest thing to it, not a compressed codec like VC1 or h264.

This is not neccessarily a bad thing either, as chances are to achieve an 'open' status, adobe would have to cator to the needs of others, and would not be able to single handedly control the format.

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RE: good move, but...

By MPE on 4/15/2008 10:45:28 AM , Rating: 3

What Adobe is trying to do is jockey themselves in to position of the growing Digital Intermediate industry. DI is basically RAW files (series of stills) with metadata embedded. Currently, there are few formats floating around - DPX being one of the more popular ones. But as the workflow and technology mature new features needs to be addressed. And these various formats are not compatible with each other.

VC1 and h264 are DELIVERY codecs for video. Adobe is talking about DI formats for PRODUCTION.

It is not going to happen. First, Apple, Avid and Autodesk needs to be on board. These are 3 commands a huge portion of the digital film industry.

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RE: good move, but...

By Methusela on 4/15/2008 12:24:56 PM , Rating: 2

Unless I've completely missed the boat, isn't the digital cinema industry already satisfied with JPEG2000 and MXF-Interop?

This is what digital projectors from Christie, Ballantyne, et al. are using as a standard for projection in movie theatres (which, by the way, are ridiculously expensive [3 to 8 times more than film-based projectors] and offer essentially zero benefit to a theatre compared to quality, maintained film-based projectors).

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RE: good move, but...

By MPE on 4/15/2008 5:22:25 PM , Rating: 2

Adobe is not really interested in the distribution - or at least they are more focused on the production. This means what the editors and post house are using and not necessarily what projectionist want (I'm sure that would not hurt either). Their software - After Effects, Photoshop and Premiere are production software.

Currently ALL three are out of the DI loop. Photoshop is too slow for DI work and has not underlying architecture to handle the metadata or output 4:4:4 or 4:2:2 video signal.

After Effects has some but is not really used for it. Premiere has 4:4:4 support but has no presence at all at this part of the post industry. It is considered low end software.

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NO! Just say NO! To Adobe

By MrBlastman on 4/15/2008 9:45:34 AM , Rating: 2

NO! I say. Adobe is the LAST company that should EVER be allowed to push for, spearhead or create a widely used file format.

.PDF and Acrobat are awful abominations of the universe that we are all enslaved to and to even think of something else coming from them makes me want to get profusely ill and rapidly expunge my bile matter.

RE: NO! Just say NO! To Adobe

By Zandros on 4/15/2008 11:50:38 AM , Rating: 2

Really? I think PDF is quite useful, and I like it a lot. Acrobat, well, there I agree with you…

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RE: NO! Just say NO! To Adobe

By martinrichards23 on 4/15/2008 12:27:14 PM , Rating: 2

problem with PDF is people use it in the most bizarre situations, when a few kilobytes of text file would do happily, people insist on megabytes of PDF.

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RE: NO! Just say NO! To Adobe

By soydios on 4/15/2008 9:28:59 PM , Rating: 2

Or they do it correctly, and it takes mere kilobytes (<20KB per page) of PDF, even with text searching, copying, and pasting enabled.

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RE: NO! Just say NO! To Adobe

By Yawgm0th on 4/15/2008 2:26:52 PM , Rating: 2

No, Microsoft and Apple would be the last companies to push for open standards on anything. Apple, however, was very influential on the IEEE 1394 standard, and Microsoft managed to get its own open document standard published recently. Cisco is considered influential enough in the networking world that many of its once-proprietary technologies become standards, and the rest are licensed and used to the point of being de facto standards.

If anything, Adobe is behind the times for not having already push more such standards. PDF is already a de facto standard in and of itself, and the negative connotations associated with it are due more to the bulkiness of Adobe Reader and the intrusive update software than any major flaw in the format itself. Luckily, Adobe Reader does not constitute the entirety of Adobe PDF readers.

As far as digital photography and cinema goes, Adobe definitely has a high stake and is a major player. If any software company should be pushing for a standard of this sort, it's definitely Adobe. As the de facto leader in photo editing and a major player in video encoding, Adobe is in a position to both design and push such formats for standardization.

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Interesting

By Shadowself on 4/15/2008 9:20:25 AM , Rating: 2

A truly open file format for digital cinema? It would be nice, but how will it be truly "the standard" without universal support?

Of the companies Adobe lists that they are "working with" neither Microsoft nor Apple are on this list. Thus is does not sound to me like they are really attempting to make this an open standard. Both of them (Apple and Microsoft) have tried to make their software the video standard and neither have. Adobe will have to go about it very differently (and invite in the other major players) in order to really make this an open standard. Either that, or it's just one more proprietary format.

Also, there already is an open digital cinema file format as part of the Digital Cinema Initiatives' Digital Cinema System Specification (already at version 1.2). Why does not Adobe join this group and work to make it even better with a broader base? Maybe because Adobe is only interested in doing things their way?

Irrelevant

By Justin Case on 4/15/2008 11:03:11 PM , Rating: 2

quote:
maybe this can do for digital video what mp3 did for music files

So you think albums are mastered in MP3? :P

This is a format for digital cinema. Meaning the kind of stuff that professional digital cameras (think 2k and 4k, not even "plain" HD) use. Very low compression (or no compression at all), 12+ bits per channel, HDR, etc.. We're talking bitrates measured in megabytes per second, and media sizes measured in giga and terabytes.

This isn't a codec, as some people in this discussion seem to think. This is more of a "meta format", like AVI or Quicktime, but with support for features that neither of those supports very well (such as raw Bayer sensor data, HDR, and embedded camera / lens status info).

But ultimately it's irrelevant. The formats will be determined by the camera manufacturers, and each will try to lock you into their own proprietary format, as usual.