Re: Free non-software stuff and what does it mean. [was Re: General Resolution: Force AMD64 into Sarge]

[Glenn Maynard <glenn@zewt.org>]

On Mon, Aug 02, 2004 at 05:13:07PM -0500, Joe Wreschnig wrote:
> > There's a cost, too, though.  Source for images is often very big (eg.
> > layered PSDs).  Source for sounds is often huge, being anything from PCM
> > data for simple recordings to Fruity Loops data, etc.  Source data for
> > a small movie clip can be much bigger.  Simply uploading this stuff to
> > the server once would take too long.
> 
> I think "preferred form of modification" still works here -- if the form
> is too large to be easily passed around, it's clearly not preferred.

I disagree.  The preferred form of modification for these movie clips is
the original lossless data, or the AfterEffects, etc. data, and so on.
If the artists modify the clips, that's what they really use--that's what
makes it source.  If we want a synthed song to be 20BPM faster, the musician
isn't going to use the PCM data; he's going to modify his source.  The fact
that it's too big to store in the repository for other people to use doesn't
change that.

> This is why I drew a distinction between "creation" and "modification"
> before; the "created" form (huge uncompressed wavs) don't give you much,
> if any, more "editability" than Vorbis, in the sense that you can apply
> filters, cut, etc, Vorbis files just as well as wavs. And while I might
> spend a long time fiddling with layers in an XCF, sometimes I merge them
> before I save, because I expect to never edit it again.

I can't apply filters to Vorbis files just as well as WAVs.  They're lossy,
which means that my filter is operating on lossy data and--depending on the
filter--the result will be lower quality.  Many times I've asked coworkers
to resample sounds, for example; I can't do it myself because I'm not willing
to decode, resample and re-lossily-encode the data for quality reasons.

I agree with the practical issues you're talking about.  I often create
stylized text images with Photoshop and don't bother saving the PSD, because
it's easier to just remember how to create it from scratch than to organize
and store that much source.  I do think this is an important and very common
case to consider, but I don't think it's a way out of the source-for-images,
etc. question, because in many of these cases, the preferred form for
modification really does exist, and really is preserved for future modification.

-- 
Glenn Maynard