Just tried compressing the containing folder and it failed, probably because a Luxo process is running, but the question I have is whether the BIMG file structure itself can be optimised to take up more space.
I only realised how large they were because I ran out of space in my freshly installed BootCamp Windows (which I had only given 16GB to, becasue I would only use it for MS) while I was doing a test Top Hemi Pano. The process failed, because the machine ran out of space.
I am pretty sure one can set the path to where MS saves the BIMGs to be on a different drive, but, if at all possible, I would rather see the option, when saving Panos, to save the temporary files where you are saving the MOV, or to a different folder, but, again, just for that one shot.
Stefano
rendering animations in full hd quality can really fill up the HD in a few days...
or if you try to render ultra high resolution stills.I've seen single bimg files close to 1 gb size...
It is easy to define a path to another drive, you can easily switch before each session. don't know about the compression.
Stefano,
You bring up a good point, we could generate the BIMG files in the folder where you want the MOV file to go. As a work around you can set the MS_TMP configuration variable to point to another drive or partition, which would be a good idea in light of the fact you have only 16GB to operate in.
Now that I think about this a bit more, we could do something along the lines of Tone BIMG Frames tool that we added to Animator. Then you could make some tweaks and spit out another MOV panorama from the BIMG files.
Going a step further we could allow you to create multiple versions by adding the ability to choose the output type assuming you rendered multiple outputs so that you could for example create both Ambient Occlusion and Color versions of Tone Mapped frames to be used for Animation or Object Panoramas.
Cheers,
JF
Jerry, everything you propose, particularly the ability to decide where the temps for a MOV or animation will go, when you send it out, and to decide how much information the BIMG will carry, would be lovely.
Because I had only just set up the BootCamp install, I redid it, yesterday, at 32 gig, but I would rather not have had to do that, since this is just for MS.
Any way, c'est la vie, an OSX version of MS would be more than welcome :-)
Ciao and thanks for the quick response
You could enable NTFS compression for that folder where BIMG are saved. It can compress BIMG up to 2x times altrought NTFS compression is optimized for text files only. The performance penalty is lower reading small files from disk.
Hi,
The bimg files are internally compressed for any channel rendered which isn't the colour and alpha channels.
The reason we don't compress these is because changing the tone mapping re-reads the image from file and we want this process to be as fast as possible.
Regards
Paul Chater