Cinema related issues
Supporting basic Cinema use-case, and removing old code
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Remove Import Cinema Image Database option from File menu. This is older version of the file format and not used. We can bring this capability back in future for the current spec. -
Image Extract Generators created on a Render View should offer a setting to choose camera-model i.e. whether to save images from various camera angles. Default should be static. Since we now incorporate camera-model for any image extract generator, we no longer need to support a separate "Cinema Extract Generator", so that can be removed. -
CIS Extract Generator will be added to generate composable image set instead of simple pngs/jpegs currently supported as image extracts. This is not targeted for 5.9, and relies on availability of a cinemascience library to save CIS files. -
When generating extract either immediately (using File | Save Extracts) or in situ (using File | Save Catalyst State), add an option to let the user choose to Create Cinema Specification. When checked, when saving the extracts, after saving the file, ParaView will use Cinema-API add a row to the Cinema database. This is done using an library provided by the cinemascience, which will be added to ParaView as TPL (third-party library). -
cinema_python should be removed from ParaView since we no longer needed it. The project should be marked deprecated and archived.
Supporting client-server use-cases
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Saving image extracts on server-side: In client-server configurations, ParaView saves data-extracts on the server, while image extracts are saved on the client. This makes it largely impractical to save a Cinema database that has both image and data products. It makes sense to save both image and data products on the same end. Let's save everything consistent on the server-side. The advantage with this choice is that the application will behave the same way when performing the extract generation when connect to a remote HPC server via a client or simply running a script using pvbatch
or via Catalyst on the HPC system (relates to #19073 (closed)). -
Change Save Extracts
andGenerate Catalyst Script
options: Currently, both of these options offer user separate locations of data and image extracts. This was largely introduced as a workaround to handle the separate process-destinations for data and image extracts. Now that they are the same, we can get rid of this separation and simply the options.
Viewing results
This is just a initial draft and not expected to be implemented for 5.9.
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Add the cinema_viewer python module to ParaView. Ideally, this module should take in command line arguments that point to a cinema database add view it. Thus, once extracts are generated from ParaView (in GUI, in batch or in situ), you should be able to do the following to view:
> pvpython -m cinema_viewer --dbase <path-to-cinema-database>
That should launch a lite web-server locally that the user can point his browser at to explore the database.