Nice! Will read into that review later... although I can only dream of having the budget of a dual-Xeon machine and I remain skeptical about the performance/price scaling at the higher end of the scale.

Referring back to the other thread, the 3 hour > 2 hour render time reduction is great, but what was the price of the new setup, compared to the old? Almost 3000$ for the CPUs alone!

If I can get it done in 6 hours on a PC that costs 1/3 of the original config price, well... you already know what I'll choose . 6 hours are nothing compared to the preparation time, shooting time, processing time, build a site, etc. Cutting the render time short by 1 hour, which costs unknown (large) amounts of money is a waste in my book.

Running performance tests on a multi-core CPU machine is purely academic. What is relevant to the performance of the machine is whether the software can utilise the cores and memory to maximum efficiency. I doubt there are many programs on the commercial market which can 100% utilise a quad core CPU and 4GB memory to its maximum efficiency.

bo; I agree with you. You are better off investing the money in a better camera, lens, etc. Set the computer to do your work overnight. When you wake up; the work is done.

tived; you get what you pay for. $25 per hour is a student learning on your machine. $60 per hour is an industry moonlighter. $120 upwards per hour is a person who knows what he is doing.

A factory install of XP, Vista or Windows 7 is good enough for general purpose work. It will take about two hours to optimise Windows for photographic work. Once optimised, a smart person takes a Ghost image of the system. If and when the system crashes, you are up and running within half an hour. A smart person will also use two drives. One for the originals and one for the backup of the originals plus burn a copy to CDROM.

aussiejohn wrote:

A factory install of XP, Vista or Windows 7 is good enough for general purpose work. It will take about two hours to optimise Windows for photographic work. Once optimised, a smart person takes a Ghost image of the system. If and when the system crashes, you are up and running within half an hour. A smart person will also use two drives. One for the originals and one for the backup of the originals plus burn a copy to CDROM.

Aussiejohn, Sorry to burst your bubble here mate, but I think we are little beyond the two hard drive setup, even on a desktop PC. Just curious, but have you experienced any difference between the windows server os's vs desktop os's? As far as I know, XP, Vista and 7, are doing just fine at running Pano software, and so does Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, 2008, however the later has better memory management then their desktop counter parts, as they are designed to run with larger amounts of memory. But please correct me if I have gotten it wrong :-) I sometimes do.

regarding if there is any program that can utillise a quad core CPU at 100% at all time, probably not, but there are programs who's activities can tie up a computer with more cpu's and more memory then mentioned, making it un-usable for other purposes, the CPU may not be at Max for the entire time, but given it will spend time reading or writing to disk or disks (plural) gives you the same out come. My own experience is this with both my systems. Which is where designing the computers with more elaborate disk sub-system. there are a few threads about this in the hardware section.

John, Please elaborate on where you get your pricing structure from and for what, its very interesting. it would be great if we talk about the same thing here. I was referring to doing photography related computer retouching, not advertising and not what a studio may be charging a client which is very different to what we are talking about here, even if the work could be the same.

Running a given test may be purely academic, however it does give you an idea of how a given machine performs compare to another if the test is the same, and given we are talking about the same software here, Autopano (Pro/Giga). The difference other then the hardware is the OS, which could be Linux, Mac or windows, in the various flavors they come in. We are all running x86 hardware is some form or another.

What Bo is experiencing, in terms of pay, is very similar to what is happening here in Western Australia, except the the price is a little higher, though proportionally its probably the same. Here too, people think that paying someone over AUD$100 is too much and chooses to go for a school student, and pay them $25 or less per hour. Only to find that they take many times longer, the result isn't as good (to any student, I am making a generalization, so don't take offense), and may ultimately have to be re-done by a professional.
Bo, sometimes when you say to people I charge $xxx per hour, they go ohh, thats expensive. If you prices the job on its own, maybe it could be a small pano, a singe image, 100 images, price it on the lot. In particular if you with confident know what its going to cost you to do the job. Suddenly it isn't the hourly rate but the total price for the project, which in many cases could earn you in excess of $xxx+ pr hour.

Bo, if they guy wanted his pano in 2 hours, then he better be paying for it :-) it isn;t about the client asking for things being done pronto. We are not just providing a product but also a service, we (well I at least) don't just do pano's but an array of different graphics requirements.

In the end of the day, its how good the workflow is that will depend on if you will make a good living or not, doing computer graphics/retouching/stitching work. If you can do 4 small pano's in an hour and you can sell these for $500 each, well then you make $2000 an hour. (obviously as has been stated, there is more to Pano's then just stitching it. There is scouting the location, going there when the weather is good (good meaning the right condition for the image you have in mind) which some times could mean you would need to return to this location several times. Obviously this isn't a problem for the 12-o'clock noon shooters, they just need to check if its raining or not. Then there is all the pre-stitching work, after the images is stitched, you may start another project, but the current project still needs some TLC, such as a few touch-ups, color many need some attention, you may add other elements into the image or remove some. This is where the computer starts to get bugged down, where you are doing a rendering on a bigger pano and you are also retouching another big pano, lets say in the 2 gigabyte size, in Photoshop or your preferred graphics application. Obviously you will be working in layers, using adjustment layers etc.... all which adds to workload the computer has to deal with. Now, your Quadcore with only 4Gb of ram isn't so snappy, even with your 2 hard drives or 8! though 8 in a nice stripe array sure do help things along.

YMMV, you could be doing small 360-degrees spheres shot with a 10mm lens 6-8 shots, all destined for the web, at its max size 100-200mb, add a few layers and you may max out at 600mb, sure half a dozen of these isn't going to cause a Quad-core with 4Gb of ram much reason to break out in sweat. Its just a warm up.

Anyway, we all have different needs, some real some perceived, what we can hope is that Autopano will use what ever we through at it, be it dual-core or a dual processor with many cores, 2Gb of ram or 64gb and hope that we have project matching what our computers can handle. In my own case this isn't the case, i constantly seem to wanting to do more then it is able to pump out at this given time, it frustrates me.

Though debating some of these issues here, helps with working out better ways of doing things, sometimes it means you have to regroup and rebuild, other times is just doing things differently. We don't have to agree on everything, but keep an open mind to what is possible.

I hope you all have a great day/night

Henrik