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Lucas Digital Releases OpenEXR Format

Posted by chrisd on from the no-oscars-till-2005 dept.

frankie writes "Although George Lucas may have gone over to the dark side, at least some of his staff prefer Freedom and light. ILM has released OpenEXR, a graphics file format and related utilities, under a BSD-style license. Among other things, it supports the same 16 bit format used by Nvidia CG and the Geforce FX. OpenEXR runs on Linux, Jaguar, and Irix; other platforms are likely to work with a little help from the community."

7 of 171 comments (clear)

  1. Incorrect link in article.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    it's www.openexr.com, not 'www.openexr'. Sigh.

  2. Re:ILM isn't Lucas by dhess · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually, he did, since this is the first time that ILM or any other Lucas Digital company has released source code for free.

    It was a group of developers who first floated the idea, but ultimately it was George's call whether or not to do it, and he gave the OK, which is pretty cool, I think.

  3. Attention Apple Users by Amsterdam+Vallon · · Score: 4, Informative

    Before you spend a half-hour downloading any packages, please note that shared libraries aren't supported yet for Mac OS X version 10.2.

    Well, to rephrase this, you can build them, but Lucasfilm have't gotten them to link due to undefined symbols and are probably
    doing something wrong in the Makefile system.

    The test suite will automatically try to link shared libraries if you've built them, so 'make check' will fail. To run the confidence tests, tell configure not to build shared libraries ("./configure --enable-shared=no").

    More details are available in the README document.

    --

    Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
    1. Re:Attention Apple Users by dhess · · Score: 3, Informative

      Sorry, the README.OSX in the distribution is misleading. I didn't mean to say that shared libs are not supported by OS X. I meant to say that the OpenEXR build system can't build them correctly yet. It's my fault, not OS X's, for not having had time to figure out how to build shared libs using autoconf in OS X.

  4. It doesn't look like it's tiled by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) · · Score: 4, Informative
    Movie making required heavy duty image processing. Often thousands of layers need to be processed together with very complex operations. In order to do this at film res you need to break the image up into tiles. A package like Apple's shake works with 128x128 or 256x256 tiles I can't remember exactly. For maximum efficiency the image files need to be stored as tiles too. So popular file formats used such as Kodak's DPX/Cineon or TIFF support tiling. Without tiling you end up with major cache thrashing as the entire image needs to be read in any time a single tile gets dropped from the cache. (I'm talking about the application cache - not the CPU or memory cache.) Even if you do low quality work at low res (eg. ILM do much of their work at hi def resolution) you can still suffer from this.

    It's not a show-stopper but tiling really ought to be there. This format doesn't really add much to already existing formats and subtracts something important.

    --
    Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
  5. Re:Is there a tool to paint in this format? by dhess · · Score: 4, Informative

    We submitted an OpenEXR plugin to the Film Gimp team, and I understand it'll show up in the next release.

    Also, Idruna Software is working on OpenEXR support for their Photogenics package. It already supports creation of and painting on HDR formats.

  6. Re:How to take 16 bit floating point pictures by dhess · · Score: 3, Informative

    A film scanner like the ones used at VFX houses can produce material with up to 14 bits per channel of color resolution. So can Panoscan's MK1 HDR camera. For reasons outlined in another thread, there are advantages to using FP numbers rather than integers to represent these values.

    The CCDs used in these devices are pretty expensive and aren't available in pro-sumer or consumer devices. For now.

    Apps like Idruna's Photogenics, Paul Debevec's HDRShop, and Greg Ward's Photophile can produce HDR FP images from scans of photos of the same scene using different exposures. This works with the cheap color scanner that you bought at Fry's or Best Buy.

    As for synthetic images, Renderman, Mental Ray use 32-bit FP internally. They can already produce 32-bit TIFF images. We're working on making the OpenEXR display drivers for these apps available with the rest of the OpenEXR software distribution.