2005.09.25 19:27 "Re: [Tiff] Additional Lossless Compression Schemes", by

It's hard to define 'wide support' in an objective manner. From where I'm standing, it sure does *seem* (=subjective) to be widely supported, though. I now a few attempts at TIFF codec that only support very limited subsets (only uncompressed, or only G3 or G4 compressed, for example), there's also Photoshop using Adobe's code base, and there's a vast amount of apps using LibTiff. The first cannot be expected to support flate compression, but the second and third do.

I'd second Joris' comment here. At least from my corner of the world (3D in film), most apps seem to be using libtiff which support the AdobeDeflate compression type. Outside of libtiff, Photoshop supports it as well. We've been defaulting tiff output to flate for a few years now without complaints (other than Deflate vs AdobeDeflate confusion).

I think it might be worth looking into a PCD-type scheme. Support for large images is getting more important as the years go by.

I'm not sure what Joris meant here by "large", I'd like to point out that more and more CG films are going to IMAX. According to one source (http://cat2.mit.edu/sagrada/cg.htm), the typical resolution here is 4K wide although the theoretical limit of IMAX is 8K.

Regards,

-Edward