Shake EXR issue

[redlum]

I've been given an exr sequence I'm to do some work on that has been converted to exr from r3d by After Effects. The sequence will load correctly in After Effects but Shake will not display anything. Nuke will display the image in B&W but with a strange scattering of coloured mosaic tiles. Fcheck says there is a broken pipe and djv will only display black and white.

Is this some kind of AE only compression issue or something to do with the channel order. When I try to look at the RY and BY channels in Nuke I get a subsampling factor error.

Any ideas anyone?

edit: seems like the b44 compression used is the culprit.

[Hugh]

Can Shake not read the B44 compression?

And why would anyone want to use B44 compression - it's a lossy compression... As are B44A and PXR24.

I'd personally generally go with PIZ. PIX, ZIP, ZIPS and RLE are the lossless compressions supported by EXR files.

[nathan]

Some use B44 as a playback format Hugh.

[redlum]

Can Shake not read the B44 compression?

And why would anyone want to use B44 compression - it's a lossy compression... As are B44A and PXR24.

I'd personally generally go with PIZ. PIX, ZIP, ZIPS and RLE are the lossless compressions supported by EXR files.

Unfortunately it can't handle b44 at all.

Thanks, I'll get them to re-output using one of those.

[Hugh]

Some use B44 as a playback format Hugh.

Fair point... But not, as redlum was wanting, as an initial conversion format...

[beaker]

Shake includes OpenExr 1.4, so yea, b44+b44a were added after that.

[beaker]

Quick question, if your not using Nuke, then what is the point of using OpenExr? There isn't enough latitude in the current Red One to fill a 16 bit float (r3d is 12 bpc). AE/Shake aren't that fast in float and are far speedier at 16 bit int.

[redlum]

Unfortunately I don't have much say over the workflow and yeah I'm finding Shake very sluggish working with them so have gone over to Nuke.

I've also discovered that the files I've got at the moment were also luminance/chrominace subsampled to get the file sizes down. Nuke doesn't like this and I'm only getting luminance in the viewer. Don't suppose there's any way around this at all?

[beaker]

Yes, b44 isn't meant to be a production working compression or even a delivery format. ILM meant for realtime playback that would give a constant bit rate which digital dailies box or other playback systems prefer. As mentioned earlier you should be using zip or piz both of which are lossless.

I would bring this up to the people who make decisions because it is obvious that someone misunderstood the purpose of b44.