burgor57 wrote:

Anyone got any useful feedback on this topic?

An upcoming version of APP/APG is promised to handle HDR more effectively. You will need some serious processing power to handle HDR gigapixel panos!

For now the consensus seems to be to process bracketed shots with a different program before stitching for best results.

Last edited by mediavets (2010-04-02 17:49:19)

burgor57 wrote:

I see - thanks.  Does anyone know when this update may be available?  I have QuadCore 2.6Ghz pc with 12Gb RAM on Vista 64bit operating system.  Should enough to cope with HDR pnoramas so long as they are not too hefty. If I wanted to do something with say 5 rows and 20 cols over 5 bracketed shots (500 shots), would you know if this setup is going to be man-enough?

Feed all bracketed and unprocessed shots into APG. In the editor set the layer´s order to "bracketed". Avoid color correction.
In the rendering-dialogue set "%L" behind the name of the render-file.

This way you get 3 seperate layers of the pano - so to speak a "bracketed pano".
These layers you can process to HDR in a dedicated application like Photomatix.

As a result you get a .exr or .hdr file which you can process with tonemapping or tonecompressing.

This way is only relevant if you need .hdr or .ext for the use as IBL (image based lighting) in 3D apps like Maya or Cinema4D.

For usual photography i also suggest - like Andrew - to process all bracketed shots in Photomatix first and stitch them in APG after that.

best, Klaus

burgor57 wrote:

Thanks for that.  I tried that and it does seem to be the best approach.  Doing a large HDR pano will be rather time consuming it seems.

Does none of the HDR software offer a batch mode?

burgor57 wrote:

I see - thanks.  Does anyone know when this update may be available?  I have QuadCore 2.6Ghz pc with 12Gb RAM on Vista 64bit operating system.  Should enough to cope with HDR pnoramas so long as they are not too hefty. If I wanted to do something with say 5 rows and 20 cols over 5 bracketed shots (500 shots), would you know if this setup is going to be man-enough?

Which QuadCore?  What harddrives do you have? 
BTW, Win 7 is generally faster than Vista.

OK, try setting up the system swap file on D: (assuming your system drive is C: and the disks are C:, D:, and E  Set the APP temp drive on E:
I never tested to see the performance with images on D: vs E: in this configuration, I have the image source and destination on D:  Also, check you system settings.  When you're doing a pano, you don't want to save power.

You shouldn't have much of a problem with that system regardless of which i7 you have or what memory configuration you use.  APP is unlike a lot of programs in that it reads and writes big files and the output (at least) is a giant file.  So normal benchmarks don't apply--if you use tiffs, most images won't fit into the processor cache and you'll be swapping to RAM a lot, so memory bandwidth will matter more.  Also, you'll be swapping to disk a lot.