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Fergus H
Community Manager
Community Manager
January 16, 2025
Question

Now in Beta: Hardware acceleration for Canon Cinema RAW Light

  • January 16, 2025
  • 7 replies
  • 5838 views

We’re excited to announce that hardware acceleration of Canon’s Cinema RAW Light format is now in the latest beta versions of Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Media Encoder. You should expect to see significantly improved editing & transcoding performance when using Cinema RAW Light files in the beta: smooth playback on the timlineline and export performance improved by up to 10x.

 

The initial beta release adds Cinema RAW Light acceleration for Apple silicon computers. A future beta will add hardware support on Windows and we will update this post when that beta is available. 

 

We’d love to get your feedback on this update!

 

Regards,

Fergus

 

7 replies

Fergus H
Community Manager
Fergus HCommunity ManagerAuthor
Community Manager
April 18, 2025

Hi all, 

 

In the latest betas of Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Media Encoder, hardware acceleration for Cinema RAW Light is now available for Windows customers with NVIDIA GPUs. We'd love to get your feedback!

 

As always, we encourage Windows customers to ensure that they are using a recent GPU driver. Customers with an NVIDIA GPU should go to www.nvidia.com/drivers, choose the appropriate hardware and OS, then download the Studio version of the driver. 

 

Regards,

Fergus

Known Participant
March 24, 2025

@Fergus H Any news on getting this also to Windows side? Or is GPU memory amount a bottleneck?

Fergus H
Community Manager
Fergus HCommunity ManagerAuthor
Community Manager
March 24, 2025

@Kirsi21888295ykon GPU memory isn't a bottleneck. It is running and being tested internally, in preparation for a public beta release. I'll update this post when it is in beta. 

 

Regards,

Fergus

Tommaso B
Participating Frequently
April 10, 2025

This is good news. I am really looking forward to see Canon Cinema RAW Light being GPU accelerated. Hopefully we can get a fast workflow with the latest Nvidia cards.
On the other hand, do you think that Canon RAW (not Cinema RAW light) could ever be CUDA accelerated?

Best regards,
Tommaso

Participant
February 4, 2025

Hey Fergus,

 

Just downlaoded and installed hte latst PPro beta, to get this enhanced Canon Raw performance on my 2019 iMac.  Specs are here:

 

 

I'm disappointed to say that my CRM files (shot on a Canon C200, 4K), import, but show up as blank screens in my projet and in the source monitor.  The same files work fine in my 25.1 (October 2024) verion of PPro.

 

Suggestions?

 

Thanks,

 

Steve Tomich

stevetomich@gmail.com

Fergus H
Community Manager
Fergus HCommunity ManagerAuthor
Community Manager
February 4, 2025

@stevetomich Thanks for the info! We do not plan on providing hardware acceleration on Apple computers with Intel processors. However, you should not be seeing a blank screen. I'll check with the engineering team and get back to you. 

 

Regards,

Fergus

Participant
February 4, 2025

Thanks, Fergus!  Sorry for the dumb wuestion--I had forgotten that my 2019 iMac was still on Intel.

Participant
January 24, 2025

Unfortunately the speed improvements still aren't up to par to make this usable on my system. I get dropped frames and slow playback with my Macbook Pro M3, Apple M3 Pro chip, 18 GB ram, driving an LG Ultrafine 27 inch display and an HP Z27Xs G3 27 inch display. 

I'm trying to view a single sequence of 5.9k raw from the C500 II with a standard rec709 transform on it and it still can't play back at full quality. 

 

Trying to run a multicam sequence of 5.9k raw form the C500II and 8k raw from the R5C is unusable and stops completely. 

Fergus H
Community Manager
Fergus HCommunity ManagerAuthor
Community Manager
January 26, 2025

Hi Dustin, 

 

Thanks for the report! Currently, playback of Cinema RAW Light media requires significantly more RAM than other formats. You can see this in real time if you open the Application Monitor (it's in Applications > Utilities). We've done testing on 16 GB computers and 24 GB computers; 24 GB worked well but 16 GB definitely did not. We are working to improve memory useage and if we release a beta that does that, I will provide an update here. 

 

Regards,

Fergus

Known Participant
January 21, 2025

In my M1 MAX Macbook Pro playback of 8K RAW light clips on a 4K timeline is possible without dropped frames in full resolution. That is awesome. But on the other hand there are multiple issues with the current beta, mainly the timeline freeze issue, that is making the use of the program almost impossible. Hopefully it will be fixed soon. What is the time frame for the HW acceleration to come to Windows? Days, weeks, months?

Participating Frequently
January 17, 2025

This is great news. I didn't use rawLT because its such a pain in Adobe to edit. Looking forward to this! Thank you!

Participating Frequently
January 17, 2025

Great update. If you could get the export times down that would be great. 8k RawLT 1:30 video takes about 12 minutes to export. The first time I used it the program crashed. Now it seems to be going good after a re-boot. @Fergus H 

Participating Frequently
January 17, 2025

When I edit it in a 4k squence and 8k raw footage it takes less time to export. So maybe that is the way to do it. Thanks so much. @Fergus H is there any way you can add in noise removal in some future update? these raw files from canon are noisy and the 3rd party noise removal plugins massivly slow down the editing and exporting.

Inspiring
January 17, 2025

Does this mean that acceleration will not be available to us still on Intel-based macs? Will this update add sliders from the Cinema Raw Development app that are currently missing, such as setting ISO, NR, and Sharpness?

Adobe Employee
January 17, 2025

Hi ghuff,
This update was designed as a performance enhancement, so there are no new sliders added with this hardware acceleration feature. You are correct, this update is not intended for Intel-based Macintosh computers.
Regards,
Martie