With the raise of the Motion Cam and its capability to capture RAW dng files, I expect a lot more users to need this function. So, any idea if and when Shotcut will support it?
RAW files is not very useful in shotcut, they have to be preprocessed in a RAW editor like darktable (FOSS) or Adobe Lightroom (PAID), before they can be used
Exactly, which is why native support would be appreciated. I have to use Resolve to edit these files and I just don’t want to 
Digital Negative (DNG) is a publicly available archival format for raw files which are generated by various digital cameras. This addresses the lack of an open standard for raw files created by individual camera models and ensures that photographers easily access their files.
Raw file formats are popular in digital photography workflows because they offer greater creative control. However, cameras can use many different raw formats, the specifications for which are not publicly available. This means that not every raw file can be read by a variety of software applications. As a result, the use of these proprietary raw files as a long-term archival solution carries risk and sharing these files across complex workflows is challenging.
Hundreds of software manufacturers such as Apple and Google have developed support for DNG. And respected camera manufacturers such as Leica, Casio, Ricoh, Samsung, and Pentax have introduced cameras that provide direct DNG support.
In addition to the Digital Negative Specification, Adobe provides the free Adobe DNG Converter , which easily translates raw files from many of today’s popular cameras. Software developers and manufacturers can download the complete DNG Specification - PDF. DNG is supported by the following Adobe software: Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom and Lightroom Classic.
Some woork has been done in enabling FFmpeg to handle DNG files (see this report by the student who did the work at the Google Summer of Code 2019: DNG image support for FFmpeg - GSoC 2019 ▪ velocity's blog), but I don’t think DNG is fully usable at present.
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Motion Cam is open source, so they’ve cracked it. Code should be available then, too 
I note that Adobe, who are the architects of DNG, do not support it in their flagship video editor, Premier Pro. Maybe there’s a reason for this.
RAW contains the raw information from sensor in the camera, you need to select stuff like exposure, white balance etc for the picture to be useful
Premier Pro did have experimental support but Adobe stopped that years ago stating:
We have not been satisfied with the performance that we have been able to achieve with CinemaDNG files in Premiere Pro, in which real-time playback is crucial.
Most cameras that can store raw, can be setup to store both a RAW and JPG version of an image.
RAW can be used for doing you own post-processing and not use the choices taken by there camera, but post-processing is needed to show the image and that need special software like darktable, It is not a job for an video editor.
Well, I have a folder full of DNGs that beg to differ but guess the DNG support at the shotcuts own goals/targets is there without a reason then, too. Resolve already does this, it can play at least FHD raw DNGs at 30fps just fine on my 1060.
Resolve just has a hidden converter that transforms you raw images into JPG and uses these to show.
The same way as Photoshop use the adobe RAW converter behind the scene when you open and edit an raw image. So they just hiding what is going on behind the scene.
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Well, the end user doesn’t really care how the software does what it does, the end user only cares if it can do what they want to do with it or not.
Yes, but I’m sure that the Shotcut developers, there is using their spare time to develop a video editor for free, don’t want waste there time making a tool that can do everything, not directly related to video editing.
This is why companies like Adobe exists, you can pay a lot of money for the integration between all the tools, you need to doing every media related thing.
But this is not how open source software development work
Just for clarity…
Does this mean some camera or post-process procedure turned each frame of footage into an individual DNG file, and then a DNG image sequence was brought into Resolve?
Or are we talking about a CinemaDNG conversion from a motion RAW file, like BRAW or REDCODE?
DNG and CinemaDNG are very different things, and I’m not sure which one we’re actually talking about here.
CinemaDNG is already on the roadmap:
- raw video processing - e.g. CinemaDNG
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Answered my own question… Google searching “motion cam” brings up a ton of irrelevant results lol. But I finally discovered that “MotionCam” is a smartphone app that creates 10-bit CinemaDNG files. This is like a generic version of RAW files for video, and is a competitor to ProRes RAW. For clarity to the above conversation, this has nothing to do with RawTherapee, darktable, Lightroom, Photoshop, or the DNG image file format. It’s the same concept in terms of standardizing motion RAW files the same way DNG standardized image RAW files.
Anyhow, now that we’ve established it’s CinemaDNG… it appears to still be on the roadmap. I am not a developer and cannot say when or what the developers will do. But my guess is that manipulating RAW in an 8-bit pipeline would be less than satisfying. I would guess Shotcut will upgrade its pipeline to 10-bit first, then potentially add RAW support.
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Yes, but I’m sure that the Shotcut developers, there is using their spare time to develop a video editor >for free, don’t want waste there time making a tool that can do everything, not directly related to video >editing.
Well, I’m sure you have wonderful time white knighting these boards but that’s not what they’re for. I’m 100% the devs want to make the best editor they can, regardless of what you or I want. I was merely asking for updates on the DNG support that’s on the roadmap.
Or are we talking about a CinemaDNG conversion from a motion RAW file, like BRAW or REDCODE?
Honestly, I don’t know which DNG format the Motion Cam uses, I just got it yesterday and I’ve been trying to get the associated software to work all day, today. All I know is it’s an open source project also and I prefer the workflow of the shotcut, even if the hardware acceleration isn’t on par with the competition (I actually own Vegas, Hitfilm pro).
But my guess is that manipulating RAW in an 8-bit pipeline would be less than satisfying. I would guess >Shotcut will upgrade its pipeline to 10-bit first, then potentially add RAW support.
That’s perfect, exactly the kind of information I was looking for; what it takes and how difficult it is to implement. Thank you!
That’s a little bit harsh… Had you mentioned that MotionCam created CinemaDNG files in your opening post instead of me having to look it up for you, then @TimLau would have never gone down the DNG-for-images rabbit hole trying to help you. To his point, extending Shotcut to do raw conversion on a DNG image sequence makes virtually no sense in terms of coding priority. There are better pre-existing tools for that job.
That’s a little bit harsh…
As is defending the devs for absolutely no reason at all, assuming everyone and everything is out here to attack them or the software. Such behavior it’s toxic enough to to be responded in kind.
makes virtually no sense in terms of coding priority.
To me it’s about how laborious the process has to be. I’m sure there are things more important than a mere import option but still, do you want to ride your car with earplugs because you don’t want to fix the muffler that’s broken or do you, down the line, for everyones comfort, fix the muffler. I mean, the car still works so why bother, right.
Fundamentally, this is the answer to “any idea if and when Shotcut will support it?”. We rely on FFMpeg to provide our codec support.
It looks like FFMpeg has some limited support for DNG:
I do not volunteer to add support to FFMpeg for new codec features. But if there is something that FFMpeg supports, but is not working well in Shotcut, I am willing to try to make it work better.
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