Folder Structure

Following the rework of constants.py (and associated files) the question of Folder Structure and dirs has come up.

For now the PR I finished has at least moved images out of the videos folder (because really, why would they be there), but there’s some open questions.

There’s two questions we have to briefly address.

First, how is the folder structure supposed to look like? Here’s I think the most current suggestion by @eulertour

media
  <module name>
    <scene name>
      svg
      images
      video
        <resolution>p<framerate>

I’m fine with that in principle, but have some reservations. In practical application this could create quite a bit of code overhead if the DIR variables aren’t broken down to one. The reason for that is if we go with this folder structure, but also have a separately defined, say for example, VIDEO_DIR, then we need separate code to move stuff around for it to look like this, lest we drop module/scene:

video
  <module name>
    <scene name>
      <resolution>p<framerate>

With respect to that something like this:

media
  svg
  images
    <module name>
      <scene name>
        <resolution>p
  video
    <module name>
      <scene name>
        <resolution>p<framerate>

Is generally a bit more consistent in behavior, whatever the DIR variables, and the code would be simpler too.

And while we could also split images by resolution like that, and I can think of some cases where that would be helpful, do we actually want to? I reckon that with the “save all images” options it definitely would be better, because without being split by resolution that could turn into a real serious mess for a user, but eh. I’m not partial to either.

Second, what are our DIR variables going to be? Currently we have:

MEDIA_DIR
VIDEO_DIR
TEX_DIR
TEXT_DIR

As @eulertour suggested and I thought of too TEX and TEXT should probably be merged into SVG. Them having to be split would be a real fringe case, and even then the cli output should be enough to do so. What about the others? Do we remove VIDEO and put it into whatever MEDIA is by default? For that matter do we just remove TEX/TEXT and put that there too, leaving only MEDIA? Or do we go in the other direction and instead also add IMAGE to place images separately?

My suggestion would be the second folder structure like that, with a resolution folder for images, TEX/TEXT put together and add IMAGE.

Any ideas or opinions?

[leotrs]

@eulertour Agreed on all four accounts (3 list items + not changing the VIDEO_DIR).

Once we decide upon and implement these changes, I will open a different issue on the following topic (I mention it here for future reference). I’m all for having the default output dir be ./media/<module>/<resolution>p<framerate>/<scene>.mp4, but I also think it would be desirable to allow the user to modify it as freely as possible. For example, a mad user (like myself) might prefer ./media/<module>_<resolution>p<framerate>_<scene>.mp4. It’d be possible to implement this easily with the config.cfg that I’m working on rn. More on that later.

But, let’s keep this discussion about the default values for now.

[kilacoda-old]

No. They save time once you’re working a lot with them, previewing and rerendering them. Instead of tempfiling them, store them in a better place.