Re: [Openexr-devel] OpenEXR image sequence files...

[Florian Kainz]

Hi David,

as far as I know, there is no ongoing work to extend OpenEXR to
image sequences.  At ILM, we store moving images as sets of OpenEXR
files, with a separate file for each frame.  The frame number is
part of the file name: foo.1.exr, foo.2.exr, etc.

Storing the frames in separate files more or less precludes image
compression techniques that exploit frame-to-frame coherence in
an image sequence, and much of the information in the file header
is redundantly repeated for each frame.  On the other hand,
operations such as editing individual frames or generating the
frames of a sequence out of order are much easier this way.
OpenEXR is a convenient format for generating and manipulating
moving or static HDR images, but it is not the best way to
package video sequences for distribution.  See the following
web page for a paper on HDR video, presented at SIGGRAPH 2004:
http://www.mpi-sb.mpg.de/resources/hdrvideo/

Florian