Re: Profile compression
Re: Profile compression
- Subject: Re: Profile compression
- From: Tom Beckenham <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2006 18:44:46 +1100
On 01/03/2006, at 6:39 AM, Rick Redfern wrote:
Why do you feel it necessary to compress ICC profiles?
I have, literally, hundreds of paper and and several
camera sensor ICC files and none of them are
large enough to warrant compression.
I have the same situation with scanner profiles and
projector profiles. I use Gretagmacbeth eqwuipment
and have several profiles that use many thousands
of colors to create the profiles. I also update them
and keep them in a dated sequence file folder.
As you stated, they are basically, text files that
tell the various devices what the profile should be.
At the cost, cheap, of hard drives today here in
the US, it is faster and easier to put hard
drives on-line and link them to our devices.
Just ASKING.
Regards,
Rick Redfern
HI Rick,
Sorry, I should have explained what I was looking for a bit better.
This is a little off topic, but it explains why I'm looking for
profile compression. Also there's commercial reasons why we want
this, so if this isn't appropriate for the group, contact me off-
line. This isn't a simple question, and it may take a development or
research project to solve. I am just wanted to put the question to
the group because I thought it was an interesting problem.
I am not sure if you are familiar with the products and services we
offer at Quickcut Adstream. I am the development manager of Graphics
and develop the QuickPrint product. What this product does is help
production staff prepare files for advertising and print. It connects
to our database of publisher specifications and downloads them to the
operators desktop. Part of this is downloading profiles.
Our publisher database is simply massive. We have over 5000
publishers in there with around 20,000 specifications. We have a
number of techniques in place to minimise what is downloaded.
Currently, there is a selection mechanism that allows the advertiser
to choose only publications and countries they are interested in. We
also now have a way of sharing ICC profiles between publishers which
has minimised the download quite a bit. We are looking to improve
this mechanism further to make it download on demand, but we are also
looking at other ways to speed up the process. It is only a problem
when the product is first installed. After the first sync, only
updates are downloaded which is usually no more than a mb per day
(specifications are being changed all the time around the globe and
updated on our DB).
The problem is that the "welcome experience" to our software is to
download several hundred megabytes of profiles unless we go out there
to install it. What we have had to do when rolling out on a mass
scale (like we are now with QP5), is to send out dozens of
integrators around around the globe to take out a CD to new customers
with not only the software but the latest profiles. We do this as
part of our service.
One of our issues with the profile downloading is that we have a
permissions system in place on the DB. This allows some
specifications and profiles to be kept private for use internally by
large publishers or trade shops, and it also allows some publishers
to choose who has access to their specifications. Most of the specs
are public (which is highly encouraged) but there are many cases
where what one customer gets when they synchronise is different to
what a different customer gets. Because of this we can't just burn a
product CD on mass with all the profiles each month. We had to create
a mechanism where each CD was prepared individually for each
customer. Yes, this is definitely at coming up with creative ways to
solve this problem in the permissions system on the DB, but still I
am looking at ways to avoid needing CDs at all.
In essence the "problem" we are trying to solve is "Its too slow to
download the profiles from our DB and install them on *new* customer
machines". We are looking at different streaming methods, dynamic
downloading on demand, and also at compression. The compression not
only has to make the profiles smaller, but it has to download and
decompress at the originators end faster than it would have taken to
download the profile uncompressed. I was wondering if anyone out
there had an innovative solution.
Also, if someone out there wants to sell us services or products to
solve this problem, please contact me off-line or see us at IPEX hall
20, D43.
Regards
Tom Beckenham
Development Manager, Graphics Group - ADG
Quickcut Adstream
_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
Colorsync-users mailing list (email@hidden)
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
This email sent to email@hidden