Warning: This is a long post.
As soon as the image is out of the camera I want it to be as free as possible from intellectual property claims from other entities. Having it in an open format helps.
So you should give them what they deserve - continue nagging and nagging and nagging about DNG support until they can't take it anymore and just implement it
- This.
For me, I've seen both sides of this discussion, as it pertains to formats and accessibility.
To illustrate, I'll use two episode that have happened to me, using Adobe and Apple [I edit video, so, yes].
Adobe:
Many moons ago, Adobe [on the Macintosh OS8 and OS9 platform] had a non-linear video editor called Premiere.
I was one of the users of Premiere, for it came with the RasterOps MoviePak™ board when the company I worked for at the time wanted to get into the computer/ non-linear editing services. We had a full Betacam A/B roll suite, and we saw that the future would include digital editing, at least so that we could sample/ digitize the tapes to include video into our CD productions. If you can't tell, this was in the early nineties.
So the company went in big, and got a Quadra 950, AV rated Micropolis [SCSI] drives, with a MoviePak board, which came with Premiere [version 1] as the software pack.
Continents shift, stars fade.
With version 4.5 Adobe decides to stop supporting the Truevision Targa 200 Pro, which was, at the time, the digitizing board we were using on both our workstations.
After some research, we find out that Apple Final Cut Pro [version 1.25] supports the Truevision Targa 200 Pro. We decide to move both of our editing stations to FCPro.
Main issue:
- No translator for Premiere projects to FCPro, meaning that any old project would not be accessible or transferable. We keep an older machine setup as the Adobe Premiere station, to have access to the prior four years of edits/ projects.
- Two different companies, at two different software development efforts, were not expected to have a common file format that easily allowed full project compatibility.
Apple:
Moving ahead to the transition from Final Cut Pro v7.x to Final Cut Pro vX [ten].
- Apple breaks compatibility between the two version, citing a completely new codebase as the reason that creating a translator would not be worth the time
- Apple immediately stops [without forewarning] the sale of FCPro v7
- User base pushes back
- Apple extends the sale of FCPro v7
- Automatic Duck creates a 'translator' between FCPro 7 and FCPro X
World is saved, until next time, right?
What the above examples [probably] illustrates, and points to ponder:
- if both companies had takes resources to write their file/ project formats to a universal format [which at the time would have been either AVID of Media 100] it would not have had an impact on sales: Premiere and FCPro were bought by those who could not afford AVID.
- Only with companies seeing a clear cost/ benefit argument does a dev team take the resources to write to a format that is alien to their codebase
- clear cost/ benefit argument occurs when many
current customers call for a feature [that would get the user base to upgrade, offsetting the development costs of said new feature]
- professional programs require stability, and in my experience, the resources that would go to a feature [relatively] few
would use would instead be put to fixing stability or improving speed
- Leica now depends on Adobe Lightroom supporting the exact DNG format from Leica cameras. They are beholden to Adobe. If Adobe stops supporting [insert operating system here, like Windows XP], then all that user base stops getting updates/ upgrades.
- It it the users' responsibility to translate/ convert files that will become obsolete with the termination of formats or software
- MacPaint [on OS6/7] used to be the 'universal' bitmap drawing file format: what happened to that?
- WordPerfect used to be franca lingua for word processing: what happened to that? Does *anything* read WordPerfect?
- I used to know [and use] WordPerfect. I'm that old. Though not too old. My files are on 5.25" diskettes. They are 'lost' unless I put a massive amount of resources to 'get them back'. The same for any other file on a medium that is retired or obsolete.
- I don't know of many companies that would help you NOT be loyal to their products, by making it easier to move to another supplier/ manufacturer.
Conclusion:
, . . . continue nagging and nagging and nagging about DNG support until they can't take it anymore and just implement it
- this is what usually works
Pascal
/I said this was going to be long.