Re: A Centillion number of formats and standards

Paul,

you hit a nerve :)

My question is why is this any different from tape formats over the years. Many reasons can contribute to this and unless we are a fly on the wall in their meetings one will never know the real reason.

1. In order to push hardware to achieve what you need it sometimes requires re-inventing the wheel, or at least part of it. An example would be a new format that can pack more metadata or read header info faster, etc....this list is long and can get very technical.

2. Market share. Come up with a proprietary solution, you must use that solution.

3. With changing industry needs older formats simply don't meet ALL of the requirements. Many formats will get you part way there but when you can have it all with a new format, whala...and it's usually proprietary.

I'm with you on standardization, which is why we went native DPX. Widely supported, gives us pretty much everything we need and allows room for some custom stuff that doesn't effect other apps BUT I can also say from an engineering perspective, things will change if they must....

My biggest concern with so many formats is simply the packing of the data properly. Some squash the range and some don't without a word, you gotta dig to find the truth. This screws with gamma among other things, which makes it difficult to compare apples to apples on an image, regardless of the format it resides in. We don't run into this as DPX can pack the full range (where in film work this is important) but we can also pack the SMPTE range for the TV guys if it's a must. Everyone we deal with understands the difference, how the image is effected and handles it accordingly for the specific projects. We can also capture in at full range and play it out in SMPTE range if need be which allows them to work with a single type of DPX if they wish for both film and TV.

I have to say 90% of our users are in a 444 RGB full range mode yet do a huge variety of work for both film and TV and the point is, it really doesn't have to be that complicated.

I tried to keep this simple, please forgive if your beyond this.

Cheers,
Ramona