Apple Shake 4 - Manual (Page 173)

Chapter 5 Compatible File Formats and Image Resolutions 173
Format Descriptions
The following section discusses some of the more useful image formats (those
indicated with an asterisk in the table above) in greater detail.
IFF
The Shake IFF (.iff ) format is not the same as the Amiga format with the same
extension, although they share certain structural similarities. The IFF format is licensed
to Alias/Wavefront for use with Maya, so Shake is ideally suited to work with Maya.
Since Shake deals with this format internally, you get the best performance by
maintaining your intermediate images in this format as well. The IFF format can
accomodate 8, 16, or 32 bits per channel, as well as maintain logarithmic information,
alpha, and Z channels. Currently, not many packages explicitly support this format, but
if the package supports the old TDI (.tdi) format, it works with IFF as well (for example,
with Interactive Effects’ Amazon 3D Paint).
CIN
Shake works with images bottom-up, meaning 0,0 is at the bottom-left corner. The
Cineon and TIFF formats allow you to write the files either bottom-up or top-down.
Because of Shake’s bottom-up nature, the I/O time (actual render time remains the
same) is four times greater when dealing with top-down Cineon or TIFF files. You can
set how Shake writes the images—reading either way is no problem, except for the
speed hit. This information is placed in a startup.h file.
.tdx Alias/
Wavefront
Explore Tiled
Texture Map BW[A, Z],
RGB[A,Z] Same 8, 16, float No
.tga Targa RGB[A] RGB[A] On/Off 8 Yes
.tif, .tiff TIFF BW[A],
RGB[A] Same 4 options,
see below. 8, 16, float Yes
.xpm XPM RGB[A] Same 8
.yuv, .qnt,
.qtl, .pal* YUV/Abekas/
Quantel RGB Same Uncom-
pressed files
with YUV
encoding 8 Yes
.yuv (10-bit) Same RGB Same Uncom-
pressed files
with YUV
encoding 16 (10) Yes
Extension
Image
Format Input
Channels Output
Channels
Compression Bit Depth tmp Files