I would really appreciate 'convert to .dng' on Ingest as an option. I know it increases the ingest time but some of my family stuff I shoot on small digi-cameras (such as the Canon S70) whose raw files may not be extensively supported years down the line. Indeed can who can say whether the likes of Nikon D2X raw files will be supprted indefinitely ? Saving as DNG should solve this problem. As far as I can make out Adobe allow free usage of the DNG format ( see http://www.adobe.com/products/dng/license.html ) & include this as an option in Lightroom. Perhaps it's not as easy as I imagine. It would be good to hear your opinion. Best wishes
The only option in DNG that will truly make your files future proof is to convert them to linear DNG, but this means that you are doing the 'demosaic' up front which if in the future a better demosaic algorithm comes along then you lose the ability to get better output.
Adobe has released an SDK that allows third party developers like us to render DNG files, linear or not, but it includes a naive demosaic algorithm and as such, using the SDK renders nowhere near the quality that ACR does (especially sharpness). Even with the SDK, you cannot load a RAW file with it and convert it to DNG. The SDK really only renders DNG files.
The DNG Converter application is the only way that I know of to convert large numbers of RAW files in various formats to DNG format. It is free for all to download and it can be run from other apps which means Photo Mechanic could automate this for you. It would require that the DNG Converter be already installed since we cannot bundle it with Photo Mechanic.
So yes, we could add such a feature.
-Kirk
