Hi,

For compositing work, is it preferable to have the clips stored as continuous movie files (like avi) or as numbered stills? The reason for asking is that a continous large movie file would likely benefit more from the increased STR of a stripe-set, than lots of small files would. Is this correct? The clips are non-compressed PAL with an alpha channel as well as deep rasters, so they're quite heavy.

Can many small files benifit from high STR as long as they are sequentially stored on disk? If so, would it be necessary to defrag extremely often to keep them grouped? What am thinking, I guess that no single defragger is capable of organising numbered files? Does this mean that continuous movie files are the only way to go for maximum performance?

Then again perhaps compositing in general does not benefit much if at all from high STR, since even if continuous movie files are used, many of them will be retrieved in parallel. Therefore the drive heads would have to go all over the place to find all of the files and the streams would repeatedly be interrupted. Thus you would need one stripe-set per clip to keep the reads sequential, which would be ridiculous. Am I totally off here?

With this reasoning, maybe it doesn't matter if you store the clips as stills or movie files. The only thing that would matter then is low latency/seek/whatever. Please tell me what you think.

Thank you in advance!