Ok.. here are my thoughts about this workflow...
I have been playing around with CineForm Studio Premium for the last few days. This has potential to be a much faster workflow than any other methods I have seen discussed. One of the advantages that jumps out at me immediately is that importing a large number is DNGs into your product is very quick (almost immediate) and this allows you to play the raw sequence in your video player right away. Other workflows take much longer to get to this point so this is a good way to be able to play through all your footage to see what you have shot, discard any bad sequences and not waste any time converting sequences you won't be using. It's also pretty amazing how the raw workflow extends right into Premiere... when you import the converted Cineform Raw files into Premiere and still can update the files live from Cineform Studio and have those changes reflected immediately in your Premiere timeline... very nice.
However, there are a couple of things that give me pause about this workflow. I think a large number of people will ending up liking the Adobe Camera Raw interface for getting their image into a very usable state quickly. Besides very intuitive exposure controls, ACR includes time saving features such as decent noise reduction. This could eliminate the need for more render intensive noise reduction plugins later. In my test footage of a fairly bright window in a dim room, ACR let me bring the highlights down and adjust overall exposure much more easily than in Cineform Studio. Other than a white balance correction, minor tint shift, and a bit of noise reduction, it only took minutes to get my footage looking beautiful. In contrast, using Cineform Studio, I found that I needed to play around for quite a bit longer to get the the point where the footage was acceptable, and it still didn't look as good as what I had achieved using ACR. Highlight preservation was especially problematic. I'm not a professional colorist by any means but that is the point... I feel this experience I described will be repeated by many like me. Another observation...I had initially opened my DNG sequence in ACR, made my adjustments, synchronized these changes to all my files, and then imported those files into Cineform Studio. I was expecting (or hoping rather) that my changes might have been preserved in Cineform Studio but alas they weren't. I'm sure there is a reason for this but it would be useful to be able to do this. Cineform Studio still to me has the advantage of non-destructive raw editing which extends to the NLE, small edit-friendly files, not to mention the ability to preview your footage very quickly in your video player before any conversion or rendering takes place.
Just some food for thought...
