Nikon N-RAW Video Will Soon Be Compatible With Adobe Premiere

For those Nikon users who prefer to use Adobe Premiere for your workflow, a major new compatibility announcement should make your life quite a bit easier.

Nikon, the brand on which I built the still photography portion of my career, has been making major inroads into the video market in recent years with both advancements in their own technology and the acquisition of RED Cinema Cameras last year. One minor—but major—hiccup has been that their excellent N-RAW video format has been unavailable to Adobe Premiere users, forcing them to either shoot in one of the H.264/H.265 or ProRes formats when using cameras like the Z9, Z8, or Z6 III, or having to switch their editing platform to something like Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve, which has been able to edit N-RAW video since launch.

This could be critical, as the N-RAW format offers 12-bit files in a wider Rec. 2020 color gamut, giving you a great deal more flexibility during post-production. The change is another benefit of the recent marriage between Nikon and RED, as Premiere Pro support for the N-RAW format is the result of Nikon N-RAW support being added to RED’s R3D SDK.

The change should open up the option of using Nikon cameras to a brand-new section of users. Likewise, N-RAW’s inclusion could be a boon to longtime Nikon users like myself, allowing us to explore post-production solutions from Adobe in return.

Adobe Premiere support for N-RAW files is expected to be included in an upcoming update from Adobe by the end of 2025.