[Tig] Universal Color Metadata challenge

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Tue, 4 Sep 2007, Stu Maschwitz wrote:
>
> I have just posted an article on my blog about what I feel is a
> tremendously important issue facing the film industry right now, and
> it relates to all of you.  I would appreciate any thoughts or
> feedback from this group.

Nice article.  From everything I have read and heard it seems to be 
right on the money except for the idea that one of the major vendors 
should take sole responsibility for solving the problem.

Unfortunately, the film industry seems to be almost incapable of 
usefully working together together to solve problems and publish 
standards.  The standards which do see the light of day are usually 
rubber-stamped re-wrapped vendor documents, white papers, or a 
description of a process or hardware which has already been in use for 
many years.  The part of SMPTE which is active at developing standards 
is the video part.  The film part of SMPTE accomplishes little except 
to specify film widths, and the spacing between sprocket holes.  The 
postproduction area is almost entirely ignored unless you count MXF, 
which is really video oriented.

Other industries don't have this problem.  If they did have this 
problem, very little of the technology we enjoy would be working 
today.  No Internet, ethernet, WiFi, cell phones, or Digital TV.

Participants in other industries see that it is vital that they 
participate in actively developing standards since otherwise there 
would be no interoperability and therefore no market to sell their 
products into.

The DCI folks seem like the exception to the rule since they have 
rapidly developed complex specifications which actually work and are 
being fielded.  Vendors and customers worked together in order to make 
this possible.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/