fnord on HD Photo and OpenEXR

fnord software has a new blog, where Brendan Bolles recently announced that ProEXR has shipped. Included with the download of ProEXR is a collection of 4 free open source plug-ins that provide access to OpenEXR files in AE.

Brendan also posts interesting comments in HD Photo: Not Too Shabby:

"You know that we here at fnord have a thing for file formats. Don't ask why, we just do. Well, there's a new format coming down the pipe, and it's HD Photo. It looks like the format to rule them all, so of course it must come from Microsoft. And that's why it pains me to say this: HD Photo actually looks really great..."

read the rest in HD Photo: Not Too Shabby.

Update: Brendan later recommended HDR Labs as well as How to Create Professional HDR Images by Ryan McGinnis.

Aravind Krishnaswamy also has an article that might also be useful: Creating high dynamic range images with Adobe Photoshop.

Update 2: podcast Technology Today talks to Tim Grey of Microsoft on JPEG XR

Brendan Bolles' CS3 OpenEXR beta filters

Jonas Hummelstrand's General Specialist announced Brendan Bolles' Multi-channel OpenEXR plug-ins (in Beta, with sample project), which "consist of a replacement OpenEXR plug-in, a 3D Channel plug-in (EXtractoR) for reading in any channels present in a multi-channel file, a regular 3D Channel plug-in (OrphExtract) that works in float, and an Object/Material ID plug-in (IDentifier)."

from the Readme: "OpenEXR has become the most commonly used file format in 3D computer graphics rendering. The format was created at Industrial Light in Magic with this specific purpose in mind. OpenEXR files store high dynamic range RGBA pixels in a 16-bit floating point format using lossless compression, but can hold an any number of image channels. Presently, After Effects doesn't include a way to read the extra image channels in an EXR file. These plug-ins have been created to fill that gap."

Brendan also includes a simpler version based on OrphEXR, which used to be available from The Orphanage. The plan is to make this package open source and freely available to the AE community, and include it with ILM's distribution of OpenEXR.