Re: [Openexr-user] Questions for more experienced users

[Kevin Wheatley]

The issues I would see are:

That cameras do not do the best job with demosaic, so storing a RAW 
bayer (or whatever) format would make more sense for high end 
applications. This is a budget issue.

The best A/D systems in cameras are at most 14bit so you don't need 
the dynamic range (currently) from OpenEXR, each additional bit is 
going to cost in terms of speed of sensor, heat budget, chip cost etc.

Anything that adds gates to the chips lowers potential yields and 
increases costs. In stills they already need JPEG compression and some 
RAW formats are actually JPEG style compressed images, so their 
existing compression system is used for all formats.

In moving images, I would think that the high end applications that 
want HDR, would have the budget for such complex image formats, but 
most vendors are actually in the consumer camera business and don't 
want to build only for the high end. To resolve this you have to make 
the mass market want it.

This suggests that maybe the professional stills cameras might have 
special modes as a selling point, and that a few years after that the 
consumers might get it. On the movie side of the business you have to 
sell it to the producers (does it save them money), directors (what 
does it do for them), cinematographers (does it actually give higher 
quality end product), etc.

My personal opinion is that currently there is no need for it, but if 
the capability existed in the sensors then its better than inventing 
yet another format. However you'll find a sudden need to wrap ISO or 
other standards around it for it to work across a wide range of 
systems and that would probably kill it...

Kevin

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| Kevin Wheatley, Cinesite (Europe) Ltd | Nobody thinks this      |
| Senior Technology                     | My employer for certain |
| And Network Systems Architect         | Not even myself         |