Re: [Openexr-devel] Hello OpenEXR list - and some questions

[Drew Hess]

Hi Mr. Zap,


On Sat, 25 Jan 2003, Mr 'Zap' Andersson wrote:

> My QUESTIONS are these
> 
> 1. Before I start... Is someone already working on a 3DSMax bitmap IO 
> plugin, making my effort redundant? 


Not that I'm aware of.  Sounds like a good idea.


> 1b. ...and may I use the libraries posted earlier on this list to link 
> against?


Of course!  That's what free software is all about.  Once we've got
Windows support in the GNU Savannah OpenEXR source tree, though, I'd
appreciate it if you started using libs built from that instead.  I'll be
posting pre-compiled libs for Windows, Mac OS X, and a Linux distribution
or two so that developers don't need to compile OpenEXR from scratch every
time they want to use it in a project.


> 2. Does OpenEXR suggest any wrapper format for multiple images, i.e. sort 
> of using OpenEXR as the "codec" in a .mov, .avi, or the like format? Or is 
> OpenExr mostly intended for single files used as image sequences


It's wrapper-agnostic.  We use OpenEXRs as single files for sequences, but
that's just the way it works around here.  You could certainly use a
wrapper format as a container if you can figure out how to do it from the
wrapper side.  Someone on the list was talking about writing a Quicktime
I/O driver for OpenEXR files; check the archives for details.



> 3. If image sequences is the suggested way to go, what is the "industry 
> accepted" numbering scheme? Tag frame numbers to the end of filenames? 
> blah000.exr, blah001.exr, etc.? Or timecodes? Or either? Or....? I would 
> like my I/O plugin to be able to treat an image sequence as if it was an 
> animation and if there are industry 'guidelines' for the naming scheme I'd 
> like to be able to support those.


I don't think there's any defacto standard.  I've seen it done several 
ways.  We use a scheme like this:  foo.1.exr, foo.2.exr,... foo.10.exr, 
foo.11.exr, ... etc.

Ideally your plugin could be "taught" about sequences, or support a few 
reasonable methods based on any feedback you get.


-dwh-