Mistyk Posted March 12, 2003 Share Posted March 12, 2003 Hi, For compositing work, is it preferable to have the clips stored as continuous movie files (like avi) or as numbered stills? The reason for asking is that a continous large movie file would likely benefit more from the increased STR of a stripe-set, than lots of small files would. Is this correct? The clips are non-compressed PAL with an alpha channel as well as deep rasters, so they're quite heavy. Can many small files benifit from high STR as long as they are sequentially stored on disk? If so, would it be necessary to defrag extremely often to keep them grouped? What am thinking, I guess that no single defragger is capable of organising numbered files? Does this mean that continuous movie files are the only way to go for maximum performance? Then again perhaps compositing in general does not benefit much if at all from high STR, since even if continuous movie files are used, many of them will be retrieved in parallel. Therefore the drive heads would have to go all over the place to find all of the files and the streams would repeatedly be interrupted. Thus you would need one stripe-set per clip to keep the reads sequential, which would be ridiculous. Am I totally off here? With this reasoning, maybe it doesn't matter if you store the clips as stills or movie files. The only thing that would matter then is low latency/seek/whatever. Please tell me what you think. Thank you in advance! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cs00bren Posted March 15, 2003 Share Posted March 15, 2003 i'm not an expert but i would guess. i don't think it would matter weather or not it was a movie or clip because they both could be placed in the ram for the Compositing out and if there was a performance gain it would be much. i haven't had any real problem with rendering out of COP withg respect to speed anyway. bren Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mistyk Posted March 16, 2003 Author Share Posted March 16, 2003 Thank you for your reply cs00bren. Your point about the video being cached by the compositor is highly valid. I was only worried that since the RAM is shared between Windows, Houdini, Halo's "cooking cache" and the video cache, the memory requirement would be rather high. But perhaps it's doable as long as the compositions are short enough. I'm leaning towards using numbered stills for compositing and, when that's done, save the final composited output as a single Huffyuv RGB non-lossy compressed movie file for the sake of playback speed. I'm also investigating the possibility to use "Windows Compressed Folders" to keep the numbered stills tightly grouped. This way the seek times should be lowered, since the drive heads don't have to look for the files across the entire disk array. Credit goes to a StorageReview forum member, who shared the clever idea of using NTFS compressed folders. Furthermore the sustained transfer rate should increase, as more video is obtained per unit data read from disk. Please comment on the approach whether you think it's reasonable or crap. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
old school Posted March 21, 2003 Share Posted March 21, 2003 I prefer a sequence of numbered images for compositing and I would probably be safe in saying that every single shop doing SFX film work uses discrete images for compositing work. Movie file formats like quicktime do have discrete images embedded in the format and you have to buy tools to extract and deal with individual images. It makes it easy for novices to deal with movie files as a single entitiy plus it is nice to deal with a sequence of images as a single file for other final purposes > distribution on the web. Just because some software like After Effects can read and write to embedded formats like .qt doesn't necessarily mean that it is the best way of doing things. Many times in compositing, you want to grab a partial sequence and shit it's timing or insert other images which is simple to do if you keep your images as discrete files. You don't need a compositor to shift sequences or mirror sequences if you are handy with a bit of shell programming as you can copy-rename files. I use shells to deal with images, more specifically "spy". spy is great for dealing with sequences of files but then you have to learn spy and some shell stuff. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
michael Posted March 21, 2003 Share Posted March 21, 2003 I agree with old school.... I've often had to "...grab a partial sequence and shit it's timing..." Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mistyk Posted March 21, 2003 Author Share Posted March 21, 2003 Thank you old school and arctor! old school, Do you use spy more often than COPs for sequence editing? Would you recommend learning spy, or is it soon to become obsolete? Is it widely used in the industry and regularly updated? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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