Re: vcs for hefty video and graphics files

From: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
Date: Nov 25, 2010, 17:34 UTC
Message-ID: <jwvr5e91fj2.fsf-monnier+gmane.comp.version-control.bazaar-ng.general@gnu.org>
In-Reply-To: <877hg55iyd.fsf@newsguy.com>

> It would involve on any one projects something like 15 to 60 GB of
> stuff to keep up with.  Large numbers of images and a dozen or 2 dozen
> video files.  All in some stake of compression depending on the codex.

FWIW, for a VCS to do a good job on this kind of problem, you'd need to use a representation that lends itself to it.

I.e. regardless of what you end up doing, I would recommend you contact the mailing-list of Free Software that can do the kind of video manipulation you want to do, and tell them that you'd need their tool to represent a project in such a way that it has a bunch of big-files that are almost never modified (containing "binary data" such as the source images and audio recordings, say) along with a few other smaller files that mostly contain instructions about how to use the big-files to generate the desired output.

Such a representation should lead to very good support from most VCSs. E.g. If these small files use a clean text representation, then a VCS might even be able to do useful merges between different branches of a project (as long as the branches share the same big-files).

        Stefan