We came across a great extension to OpenEXR, OpenSXR which is a stereo extension. This will allow dual images to be stored in the one OpenEXR file, and actually could be used to store more than 2 images if you needed to. This will solve a huge data management problem when working with Stereo images. Having to keep two frames linked throughout post can be a huge pain.
Multiple views of the same scene may sometimes be stored in separate files rather than in a single multi- view file. An OpenEXR file that contains one of multiple views of a scene should identify the stored view using the multiView header attribute. For example, if RGBA data for the left and right views of a scene are stored in two separate files, both files should contain a multiView attribute. In one file the attribute lists only the left view; in the other file only the right view is listed. Each file has four channels, called R, G, B and A.
In talking to one of the authors Matt Welford (Weta) the team also think the extension should be saved as .sxr when storing stereo images. “Currently this is the what several other vendors are using the format (Nuke, Silhouette, RV) and we can do internally with Shake” he said. The OpenEXR extension was proposed by Welford and Peter Hillman.
For sample files – click read more below
The stereo EXR (SXR) format has been through a couple of revisions since it was first proposed.
As yet there have been no official EXR releases with the new standard, but you can get the code out of the repository.