Re: Questions for more experienced users

On Tue, 6 Mar 2007, Kevin Wheatley wrote:

> Florian Kainz wrote:
>> The Academy's Image Interchange Framework has talked about adopting or 
>> defining an image sequence container at some point, but so far any 
>> plans are rather vague.  The committee is currently focusing on some 
>> thorny color management issues.  Container files have not been a high 
>> priority, at least in part because the committee members are using 
>> workflows based on one file per frame, and those tend to work well in 
>> practice.
>
> container files along the lines of MXF for interoperability are evil...
>
> Personally I've got a container file format I like ... its called a 
> directory :-)
>
> If you need to wrap them into a container to give you a single file, I 
> suggest tar/cpio or similar don't invent anything beyond using the 
> existing ones.
>
Sadly true, and I'd be the last to disagree with you, but for our media 
environment, tracking project/customer/workorder/operator/etc. from site 
to site (as our media moves around the planet) is a major technical and 
procedural challenge that formats like cpio and tar don't effectively 
address (especially when dealing with a large and well-designed site 
shipping media to a small and ad-hoc site, or vice-versa).

Evil as they may be, they nonetheless exist for a reason; I'm hoping that 
SMPTE and the Academy can put together something open, competent, 
comprehensive, and most importantly, OS and platform agnostic.

Yeah, it's shooting for the moon, but a man can dream, can't he?

Klaus