Glossary

Teflon is a new software design with it's own set of names for its concepts and implementation details. During the development of the system we also try to bring up a name-space that is familiar, technically correct and not in collision with traditional cinematic language. Sometimes we felt we need to depart from common names used in digital post-production today. For example the closest concept to what the traditional "project" term covers is called "show" in Teflon.

If reading the documentation you feel that the exact meaning of some frequently used term or expression needs clarification, you should try to look up it here first.

This document is also under heavy development, but ideally changes are only additions, as we introduce new terms as they emerge during implementation. If you feel that a term is not defined here when it should, feel free to insert a line in the form * **term**: UNDEFINED, so we can pick it up and come up with a definition.

General Terms

• directory: The terms directory, dir and folder are interchangeable, they have no semantic differences.
• file: Regular files.
• file-system object: a file, a dir or a symbolic link.
• path: A string containing an absolute file-system path in unix's notation.
• target: positional arguments given to the teflon command are in target notation. Targets are always referring to files and can be traditional ralative or absolute paths or show-absolute paths. Show-absolute paths start with // which refers to the show which the current working directory belongs to. If the command expects special objects as targets, then the directory part of the path is extended with the special object's standard directory path. For example if the command expects a prototype //vfx/Sh_ will be extended to //vfx/.teflon/proto/Sh_ and then converted to a file-system absolute path.
• link: Links are all kind of file-system links, like symbolic and hard links, bind mounts or even network shares.
• teflon link: Teflon's own managed link facility.
• teflon dir: Metadata and special objects are stored in directories named .teflon inside the directories where the things are they belong to.
• config dir: Configuration for teflon processes are stored in config dirs. The exact name and location of the config dir for the process must be set in the TEFLONCONF environment variable. There is no command line flag to set it, and Teflon will refuse to run without it.
• show: Highest level of administrative unit, similar to a project in other systems, but rather different. The most important property of a show is that it's self containing.
• metadata: Teflon has its own way of storing metadata about files or directories. When we say metadata or meta we mean Teflon metadata. We have a different term for metadata supported by some file formats.
• embedded metadata: Some file formats have their own way of storing metadata. When metadata is coming from a file directly, we refer to it as embedded metadata. You should hear less or ideally none about these, since Teflon's policy is to copy these to Teflon meta.
• server: A Teflon server is a Teflon process that runs continuously, watching show directories for changes and triggering events enabling busy evaluation and other administrative possibilities. It also maintains shares between devices and serves the GUI through http.
• version: A saved version of an object.
• file-system event: Events reported by the file-system.
• Teflon event: Events generated by Teflon. When only "event" is used it most probably means a Teflon event.
• Teflon Reference Configuration: Teflon comes with a reference configuration, that can be applied and/or modified by users to fit their own need. Sometime we abbreviate it to TRC.

Objects

The Teflon primitives are:

• object: A file or directory with assigned Teflon metadata represented in memory of a Teflon process.
• special object: Special objects have distinctive roles in Teflon and have their own specialized set of metadata. Special objects are stored inside the teflon directories. Prototypes, sequences, users and devices are examples of special objects. As any other files in Teflon, special objects can have metadata assigned to them, and their relations to other objects and behavior logic is stored there.
• sequence: a group of numbered files that can be handled as one logical entity
• contract: A condition that matches objects and a set of event scripts that run when an event occure to a matched object.
• event: A file-system event that involves the change of the file-system state of an object.
• user: A Teflon user.
• device: A computing device involved in a show.

Operations

• measurement: A an object that is not reproducible by synthetic means. For example camera footage or photographs or renderings with missing dependencies.
• transformation: A deterministic transformation of one or more object into another objects. Conversions, renderings can be think of as transformations.
• transformer: A program that can execute a transformation on objects.
• dependency: An object that a transformation depends on.