Blackmagic CinemaDNG support and source settings

This next feature is not going to benefit everybody. But it makes me really happy. And that is that the Blackmagic Pocket Camera, is very well supported now, inside of Premiere Pro. And Adobe has now rolled in fantastic support for both the ProRes and the raw files. Giving you a lot of flexibility when working with the material. I have some footage from the field. It's just on a USB three hard drive and it's from the Black Magic Pocket Camera. Let's bring that in. And we'll navigate to that drive. And these are all raw files.

Comes in. Reads the clip. And we're hover scrubbing. Let's go up a level. Loads in. There it is. With a right click and an import, it brings it right into the project. Or, in fact, you could just double click to load the source. Let's press play. And you see that the raw video file, a Cinema DNG sequence is playing right off the USB hard drive. Real time performance of Cinema DNG off of a cheap hard drive. So, this is awesome because it gives you flexibility. And remember because this is a raw file, you can also access the Source Settings.

This makes it easy to do things like recover the exposure a bit or dial in a custom white balance if needed, giving you some flexibility. And if you really feel you've screwed it up, you can always go back, and reload from the original file. This is awesome because it gives you great control over the material. There we go. Bring that down slightly. Or use the arrow keys in fact. So one of my favorite ways is to just use the up and down arrow to dial that in a little more accurately. And then click okay, and that source will update.

Alright. Let's do that one more time. Go to the media browser. We'll use the Back button here and grab another clip. Bring that in, there's the raw file. Set that to full quality for a moment, and you see even at full quality, smooth playback. We'll turn on the drop frame indicator and press play. Dropped a couple of frames. But nothing significant. Real time playback, most often even at full quality. Better the hard drive connection, the better the performance. But this is awesome that the cinema DNG sequences get treated as clips and come in right away.

Now this is the cinema DNG, the compressed version that's used by the pocket camera. But the good news is that this support has rippled across things, because other cinema DNG formats are also supported from other manufacturers. This is a standard that's starting to rise. And you might have noticed something while I was in that media folder. Let's go back to the media browser for a second. Let's import those from the media browser, and drop them into a 4k sequence. We'll start at half quality. Turn on the drop frame indicator. Press Play.

Not too bad, those frames are starting to get optimized. There we go. That's 4K footage, coming into the system, and working absolutely fine. So, these cameras are just starting to hit the market. Now depending on when you watch this training, there might be a lot of them out there. But, I managed to get my hands on one of the first ones, and I'm thrilled to see that the Black Magic support in Premier Pro has gotten better across the line. Whether your using the pocket camera, or the 4K model, or anything in between. As well as the ProRes and the Raw workflows. And remember, if you are into Cinema DNG or using some of the other cameras that are starting to add support.

Adobe had worked closely with those manufacturers as well, and has dramatically increased the Cinema DNG performance.