[crazygringo]

Ah, that's a great point.

It does seem like it's high time for there to be some kind of RAW-over-time standard, e.g. a single file with 2 hours of exposure that Photoshop would have built-in tools to manage -- and even the ability to handle matrix transformation movement over time, e.g. to photograph stars over 5 minutes.

I wonder how useful it would be to embed gyroscope/accelerometer data with it though? Everything I imagine having to do with long/stacked exposures involves a tripod.

Motion data actually seems like it would be more useful to embed in regular-exposure RAWs, since it could help build a deconvolution kernel to undo motion blur.

[sudosysgen]

The idea would be that all stills, instead of being just a single still, are actually multiple stills that can be stacked on top of one another in order to reduce noise and reduce motion blur, as well as increase dynamic range.

Of course, this would need a camera with much faster sensor readouts, which should be possible with Sony's next generation of stacked sensors.

[crazygringo]

I would love that. I'm incredibly curious to see where things are headed, because it feels like this has to be the way forwards.

Of course, storing 100 or 10,000 stills would up storage requirements dramatically -- but then lossless compression should bring that back down to entirely reasonable levels.

Because all you really have to do is compute the "average" image across the entire exposure (or at various "keyframes" if there's significant motion) and then encode the differences from those, which is trivial to compress.

I really hope this is something we see in the next 5 years, as opposed to 20 years.