IRIDAS, a leader in products for digital cinema workflows, today announced universal support for the emerging CinemaDNG standard in all of the 2009 versions of its products.

CinemaDNG is an industry-wide open and documented file format for digital cinema acquisition currently developed by a consortium of hardware and software manufacturers, led by Adobe Systems Incorporated.

“Adobe and other industry leaders designed CinemaDNG to create a flexible, streamlined exchange of RAW image data between digital cameras, software, and storage systems,” said Michael Coleman, Digital Video product manager at Adobe. “IRIDAS’ adoption of the CinemaDNG format for its next product releases reduces the complexity of RAW

CinemaDNG files store unprocessed RAW data from digital cinema cameras in a unified format, making it easier for post-production software to provide access to files from multiple camera types.

“IRIDAS is currently the only vendor to support all digital cinema RAW camera formats used in production today,” said Lin Kayser, CEO of IRIDAS. “However, we see the current proliferation of formats as a key obstacle to the adoption of RAW post workflows. We hope to see camera manufacturers output directly to CinemaDNG, so the camera choice is less driven by post-production and more by the preferences of the cinematographer.”

Through the new IRIDAS RealTime RAW 3.0 technology, the industry’s only GPU-accelerated full-speed RAW processing engine, SpeedGrade, FrameCycler and MetaRender are now able to work with CinemaDNG files up to 4K in real time. In addition to CinemaDNG, IRIDAS continues to support RAW files from ARRI, RED, Silicon Imaging, Vision Research and WEISSCAM. To open up a standardized workflow for these existing RAW formats, the 2009 versions of IRIDAS products can now also transcode into CinemaDNG.

It is common practice to transcode from the original RAW file to an uncompressed RGB format such as DPX very early in the pipeline – or even play out to tape. While this is a viable workflow, it does not take advantage of the high fidelity contained in the original RAW file. However, keeping the RAW file for as long as possible in the workflow currently requires that post tools support many different vendor-specific RAW file formats. A standardized format will help remove multi-vendor file format complexity from the production pipeline.

IRIDAS is introducing the 2009 versions of SpeedGrade, FrameCycler and MetaRender at the NAB show, April 20-23, in Las Vegas. See IRIDAS at booth SL 4728 or visit www.iridas.com for more information.