On 29 Apr 2005, at 20:38, Jesse Ross wrote:
Have you done a lot of work with raw audio tracks and video
footage? We're
talking about hundreds of megs or even gigs worth of data in a _single
file_. While versioning might be trivial for text documents or even
images, the amount of space that would be consumed in versioning other
media is overwhelming. It's not an excuse not to make it happen
(since we
will likely not have pro quality video/audio editing apps for
Etoile for a
few years, and in that time HD storage cost and RAM cost will only go
down, and processors will get faster), but just something to consider
while thinking about implementation.
Hi Jesse, sorry for the delayed response - I've been a bit behind
with this list recently. Nicolas and I discussed this idea for about
an hour before his post, and this was one of the issues that came
up. I work with a lot of video footage, and was amazed by how
quickly I was able to fill up a 320GB hard disk. It occurred to me,
however, that all of the editing I do is non-destructive. I get a
10GB dump from a DV tape, and then everything else between that and
the final, exported, result is a series of deltas. Pre-rendered
results from transitions / effects are stored, but only for the
latest version. I would recommend that we have a cache category of
object - those which can be generated from deltas - be added. These
would have a very low storage priority - they would be kept for as
long as possible, but deleted when disk space was low, starting with
the least recently accessed one (with eviction priority given to
those that took the longest to generate, if we could record this
information). Additionally, I would like a very low priority process
(nice -20) which would speculatively re-generate some of these cache
objects if disk space were free.
