Why? I'm just stating a common fact: you make things convenient, people get
lazy. That is why most M$ users know zilch abouth the machine they're using. I
honestly don't know about the Mac users.
Anybody: was my post offending? If so, I'm sorry.

Margus

Peter Popov wrote:
> 
> I smell the kerosene and hear the roar of the flamethrowers already...
> Please don't... please...
> 
> Peter Popov
> ICQ: 15002700

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On Sat, 03 Jul 1999 03:49:42 +0300, Margus Ramst <mar### [at] peakeduee>
wrote:

>Why? I'm just stating a common fact: you make things convenient, people get
>lazy. That is why most M$ users know zilch abouth the machine they're using. I
>honestly don't know about the Mac users.
>Anybody: was my post offending? If so, I'm sorry.
>
>Margus

Not to me it wasn't. I just remembered an old flame war that one of my
General Computing teachers and I used to have when I was in
high-school. She was a diehard Mac user and I was a DOS user (and
later 95), so I thought some of the Mac users might get picky. It's
better to prevent fire now than fight it with fire later, right?


Peter Popov
ICQ: 15002700

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On Tue, 29 Jun 1999 21:16:41 +0100, Alain CULOS <ZAl### [at] bigfootcom>
wrote:

>Of course it can be a headache maintaining such a version and getting
>complaints from reckless users, but with proper warnings (in the message
>windows when the option is selected for instance as well as in the docs
>and whereever the mention of JPEG is made), well with proper disclaimers
>it should diminish negative feedback.

  Hi, Al. The worst-case scenario of a long render time combined with an
inferior JPEG quality setting is very likely to occur, IMO. Here's why -
some JPEG artifacts may be difficult to see at lower test resolutions but
show up in the final render resolution, and there is not one overall ideal
setting for JPEG quality that will work for all scenes. I foresee having a
bottle of Extra-Strength Tylenol handy.

  Documentation is only as good as the time put into reading the thing. Yes,
it'll reduce the complaints of poor output quality but won't eliminate it.
In the past, I have fielded a question posted by novices. What they said
was, "I have just downloaded POV-Ray. How do I make a 3d image?" This is not
to say that they are not intelligent people but perhaps it illustrates their
inexperience with computer software in general.

>JPEG has positive points as well as negative points, why ignore
>the positive ?

  I like JPEG. I use JPEG. A lot. But, for me personally, I prefer to output
.png (PiNG) and then use my third-party software to convert the image to
JPEG. I am free to experiment with the quality settings, as well as compare
the JPEG output of Paint Shop Pro to CompuPic, in the search for the best
result. It takes a matter of seconds (not hours or days) to convert a 1024w
by 768h .png to JPEG of any quality, so I can check out a dozen image
conversions very fast. However, if one chooses the wrong JPEG quality
setting for (unofficial) POV-Ray output, there's not much they can do. You
can't take an inferior image and make it better. For some people, we are
talking anywhere from a few hours to a few days of rendering time that would
be wasted.

  In no way should my opinion be construed as a put-down to the author of
the unofficial compile, nor of the JPEG file format. I simply have
reservations about incorporating JPEG output (input is another matter) in
the official POV-Ray.

respectfully,
-- 
Alan
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>  However, if one chooses the wrong JPEG quality
> setting for (unofficial) POV-Ray output, there's not much they can do. You
> can't take an inferior image and make it better. For some people, we are
> talking anywhere from a few hours to a few days of rendering time that would
> be wasted.

The same could be said of choosing the wrong anti-aliasing, quality, or
radiosity settings.  As it is, you can set the output to 15-bit PNG.  That's
going to look bad too.

-Mike

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Mike wrote:
> 
> >  However, if one chooses the wrong JPEG quality
> > setting for (unofficial) POV-Ray output, there's not much they can do. You
> > can't take an inferior image and make it better. For some people, we are
> > talking anywhere from a few hours to a few days of rendering time that would
> > be wasted.
> 
> The same could be said of choosing the wrong anti-aliasing, quality, or
> radiosity settings.  As it is, you can set the output to 15-bit PNG.  That's
> going to look bad too.
> 
> -Mike

  At least it won't possibly maybe be compounded by the use of a more
worser badly image format type problem thing. There's that there stuff
to consider also too you know kind of.

-- 
Ken Tyler

mailto://tylereng@pacbell.net

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On Sat, 03 Jul 1999 00:45:54 -0500, Mike <Ama### [at] aolcom> wrote:

>The same could be said of choosing the wrong anti-aliasing, quality, or
>radiosity settings.  As it is, you can set the output to 15-bit PNG.  That's
>going to look bad too.

  Hi, Mike. Yes, there are a lot of ways to trash a perfectly good scene.
This is why I wouldn't introduce the JPEG quality setting 'guessing game' to
POV-Ray output when third-party JPEG conversion software is the fast,
simple, and painless solution to use *after* the render is done. And, I
would still have the original lossless 24-bit image in case I changed my
mind later.

-- 
Alan
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Dear Alan,

<snip>
 I had written :

> >JPEG has positive points as well as negative points, why ignore
> >the positive ?

You (Alan Kong) replied :

>   I like JPEG. I use JPEG. A lot. But, for me personally, I prefer to output
> .png (PiNG) and then use my third-party software to convert the image to
> JPEG. I am free to experiment with the quality settings, as well as compare
> the JPEG output of Paint Shop Pro to CompuPic, in the search for the best
> result. It takes a matter of seconds (not hours or days) to convert a 1024w
> by 768h .png to JPEG of any quality, so I can check out a dozen image
> conversions very fast. However, if one chooses the wrong JPEG quality
> setting for (unofficial) POV-Ray output, there's not much they can do. You
> can't take an inferior image and make it better. For some people, we are
> talking anywhere from a few hours to a few days of rendering time that would
> be wasted.

<snip>

I do use PNG almost exclusively myself, then use third party tools to
convert/crop/rescale/... But there is a specific case where jpeg output might be
desirable :

Project :
The IMP (Internet Movie Project)

Characteristics :
- This project is distributed amongst many persons / many platforms.
- Output files are going to count in many thousands, maybe millions if you count
pre-renders, trashing some of it, error-correction game.

Business case :
Given the above characteristics integrating jpeg output to pov will bring the
following safeguards to our project (and possibly similar projects in the
future) :
- All platforms will get the exact same version of JPEG libraries, thus making
it for consistent output. If bad luck struck and a minor bug showed, it would
show everywhere, therefore it might not be as noticeable in the sequence of
images rendered by different platforms.
- JPEG settings will be chosen at POV level, thus reducing the risk of people
tweaking with them in external utilities - this will ensure better consistency
through out.
- When going for a render, it is not just a few images we are talking about, but
possibly hundreds in the one go. PNG could clog up disk space quickly, JPEG
would save the burden of disk space for much bigger renders.
- Implementing post scene commands could be an answer to the problem provided
such commands could be written in the same manner, which I believe is not the
case, for all platforms. Or maybe that is the way to go and implement different
ini files for different platforms, but we'd rather avoid that since JPEG can be
and has been integrated in some custom compile.
- On the large amount of files that will be generated, this will certainly save
us a bit of time, not much I would agree, but certainly some and everything
counts.

That's my own point of view and I appreciate others might not agree.
Cheers,
Al.

--
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To answer me, please take out the Z from my address.

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I envision a scene: Somebody gets a couple of thousands of frames to
calculate in his computer and spends the next few weeks doing that just to
discover that the JPG's are too poor quality (perhaps caused by that big
red object over a light background...).
  A quality setting may be good for most frames, but I'm completely sure
that you can't use the same settings for all frames. There are pathologic
cases where you get artifacts no matter how much quality you set.

-- 
main(i,_){for(_?--i,main(i+2,"FhhQHFIJD|FQTITFN]zRFHhhTBFHhhTBFysdB"[i]
):5;i&&_>1;printf("%s",_-70?_&1?"[]":" ":(_=0,"\n")),_/=2);} /*- Warp -*/

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On Wed, 07 Jul 1999 21:16:54 +0100, Alain CULOS <ZAl### [at] bigfootcom>
wrote:

>I do use PNG almost exclusively myself, then use third party tools to
>convert/crop/rescale/... But there is a specific case where jpeg output might be
>desirable :
>
>Project :
>The IMP (Internet Movie Project)

  For consistency's sake I can see why you would want a standardized output,
since so many individuals would be generating the frames.

>- JPEG settings will be chosen at POV level, thus reducing the risk of people
>tweaking with them in external utilities - this will ensure better consistency
>through out.

  This makes sense for this project. Artifacts from some frames not being
saved at the optimum quality setting will be less noticeable in an MPEG
animation as compared to a single image.

  I'm just not convinced that incorporating JPEG output into the official
POV-Ray is appropriate.

>That's my own point of view and I appreciate others might not agree.

  Respectfully, I must say the same thing :)

-- 
Alan
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Alan Kong wrote:

> On Wed, 07 Jul 1999 21:16:54 +0100, Alain CULOS <ZAl### [at] bigfootcom>
> wrote:
>
> >I do use PNG almost exclusively myself, then use third party tools to
> >convert/crop/rescale/... But there is a specific case where jpeg output might be
> >desirable :
> >
> >Project :
> >The IMP (Internet Movie Project)
>
>   For consistency's sake I can see why you would want a standardized output,
> since so many individuals would be generating the frames.
>
> >- JPEG settings will be chosen at POV level, thus reducing the risk of people
> >tweaking with them in external utilities - this will ensure better consistency
> >through out.
>
>   This makes sense for this project. Artifacts from some frames not being
> saved at the optimum quality setting will be less noticeable in an MPEG
> animation as compared to a single image.
>

Actually, this is where for the IMP I would like to avoid JPEG. Taking a source
image through one lossy compression before going through another often degrades the
final quality and/or increases the file sizes. In early work producing MPEGs, this
was one of the things that actually did matter. The cleaner the sources, the better
the MPEG, and JPEG was to be avoided.

At some point, one person mentioned that Antz used JPEG compression on their frames
before storage. Probably the main difference is that Antz was going out to film
recorders while the IMP's output is most likely going to go out to MPEG.

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