Topic: Spaghetti Progress - March 2009

[Fanny Pack]

Like I've said before... palettes are a perfect solution in certain situations. Consider the case of a cartoon like animation. These usually only have a small set of colors. If there is one-and-only-one palette, then it is easy to make global changes to all of the frames' colors and it is also easy to make sure that the colors are consistent from one frame to the next.

You don't need embedded palettes for that because they could be generated by analyzing the file.

[BlinkenLights]

this is true.. and i think laserboy does that too

[James]

Yes it does. But the palette you get is in numerical order as an array of 24-bit integers, so that LaserBoy can reliably compare one palette to another for equivalency.

Palettes created by humans are usually in an order that looks nice.

I'm an artist. I like to have more possibilities to work with; not less.

What if you make a special palette and do the first few frames and then pass it off to someone else to work on? What if you didn't use all of the colors in those first few frames? The rest of your palette is lost!

What if you are working with a system that has some kind of limitation on the color model; like you only have TTL green and analog red? Wouldn't it be nice to know up front that THESE are the only possible colors you are going to be able to project?

You already support format 2! What are you talking about? !!!

James. 

[Fanny Pack]

Palettes are useful and used for all kinds of media but I can't think of any other media that has the palette embedded into the finished product.  If anything, the use of palettes has been the weakness of ILDA files and has caused the most problems.  If they left it to the design software to keep track of palettes externally and used RGB values for each point to begin with we wouldn't be in this mess.  It is silly to impost the limits of ILDA files on the designers and to impose the verboseness of the design tools onto the end product. 

[BlinkenLights]

i believe we are getting somewhere..


the point i see here is that TOOL needs to maintain the pallet, is that right Gary?

The ilda file format does not need to maintain that pallet but james point is valid, especially from an artistic point of view. If you want maintain a peice of the artists intention other than just the finished frame, a pallet is a nice way to do that..  and if the artist is dead or otherwise unreachable, and you have no idea what software he is using, it would be nice to still have that peice of his intentions. Thats kinda the point of art.

as far as the file format is concerned I think this is another glaring example of where bit structures fail to convey. Data is symbolic at its origin and art is in itself not data but the expression of wisdom by the artist. Im not sure if we can actually create a file structure to handle all of the posibilities of an artist intention...

The disconnect is that ILDA file structure always used (past tense) pallets as a storage medium and not a reference or origin point. The format 3 (version James) was a way to bring the pallet to the artist in a way that would be transferable over time and space (deep thoughts here)..

http://www.systems-thinking.org/dikw/dikw.htm

[meandean]

 OK! I'll take back what I said about palette- I was cracking on the traditional 16 & 256 color VGA modes.
The generic concept of a custom palette of N colors, or even N indices actually is very useful. Think of
a bitmap as a custom palette with 2 indices (x,y) for each element in the color table; or for that matter,
let's have 3 indices- a canned color continuum of hue, saturation and gray level.

 Both LW and 24Plotter allow for the import of a 'bitmap as color plane' that can be warped, twisted and
remapped, as well as built-in 2 & 3D color tables.

[James]

The ILDA file format is nowhere near a "publisher's" document.

It is a format for the exchange of artistic elements.

It tells you nothing about it's use in a finished laser show!

A bitmap is a more complete idea, in that it can tell you what dpi (size) it is supposed to be preinted ~ and some bitmaps have palettes!

James. 

[meandean]

 Speaking of ILDA... If I import wave from LW into LB and I have the 'save as format 4-5' off, LB still knows the data is 24bit.
Is LB saving the material in the infamous fmt 3 (instead of reducing it to palette)?? This might explain why it doesn't open in Spg.

[James]

Well what the hell.......

We're so OT Spaghetti at this point.....

Yes. LaserBoy knows that it is 24-bit color and it saves it with BOTH a format 2 bit reduced palette and format 3 color tables. This makes it possible to read it either way. If your reader is designed to skip unknown sections, you should get a reasonable representation of the art in 256 colors.

James. 

PS This is all good discussion... But maybe we should have a joint computer programming section rather than doing it all here in Gary's section.

[BlinkenLights]

agreed..

[drlava]

Tried to run my old 1.8.0.6, much to my suprise....

*This version has expired*

and it exits

 

[meandean]

 Tell me about it...