"Francesco Poli" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Exactly, and in some cases an author/maintainer *may* prefer to modify a
lossy-compressed form directly.
In some other cases, he/she *may* prefer working on uncompressed data
and recompress afterward...
Yes, I'm really starting to question the idea of source.
It seems to me that the "preferred form of modification" seems to depend on
the desired modification.
Since this is Debian, I will use the example of Toy Story. Let us say that
Steve Jobs inexplicably decides he wants to release Toy Story as a
open-source movie, and manages to convince the rest of the people at Disney
that this was a good idea.
Thinking about only the video portion, what would we call source?
I can see three answers to this:
1. The model files, lighting, and animation information. This can be used to
regenerate the movie.
2. The original raw frames of the rendered video.
3. The compressed final video stream.
Lets take a closer look at these:
First look at the first option. This is clearly the most high-level
description. It may seem like this is the ideal format to call source.
Certainly this would be the form one would prefer if one wanted to introduce
a new character, or replace a character in the movie. Also this would likely
be the preferred form for making major plot changes etc.
However, the recourses required to render the movie are significant.
The movie used 117 computers (87 dual-processor and 30 quad-processor
SPARCstation 20s and one eight-processor SPARCserver 1000 [How 87+30+1=117
is unclear to me.])which thus totals 302 processors, and a combined
performance rate of 16,000 MIPS (This is probably the value most relevant
for today).It allegedly would have taken 43 years for a single processor to
render the entire feature. Even with the significant speed increase in
computers since 1995, it should be clear that rendering the movie would
still be a significant undertaking.
That to me indicates that for many types of modification this would not be
the preferred form.
Now lets look at the raw frames. They took up approximately 300 MB of
storage each, for a total of 144000 frames. That yields a total of around
43.2 terabytes. I think we can rule this out as the preferred form for the
vast majority of modifications.
So how about the compressed video stream? For some types of modifications
such as creating a "music video" by syncing clips from the movie to music
(Youtube is full of examples of this), this is probably the ideal form for
modification. But it is not really useful for some types of modifications
which may include introducing new characters, or major plot changes.
So which one(s) should be considered source?
Sincerely,
Tacvek
Source for Toy Story Statistics:
http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/1995-11/sunflash.951130.3411.xml
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