Obviously, I have no idea what i'm doing. (i thought i did) any ideas?

[inMotion]

Obviously, I have no idea what i'm doing. (i thought i did) any ideas?

by inMotion » Mon May 28, 2012 12:14 pm

Shot with canon 5dm2, 100-400 lens at 400 at f.25, 200 shutter speed, iso 640. It took about 3 hours to shoot without a motorized head. (China custom's wont release it for another 20 days - but the project must go on).

The origonal pano that i shot is about 1500 RAW images from a 5d mk2. - the detection takes FOREVER and then stops about 1/4th of the way through with no error messages. Anybody know what causes that?

My computer is win7 64bit ultimate, Corei7 2700 @ 4.4ghz, 16gb ram, 128gb SSD, 1tb 7200rpm, Geforce GTX560. only 30gb free on the SSD which i set to use as cache as well as the 1tb for secondary cache. Do i need more ram? Another SSD?

I converted the images to 25% size jpgs, kept EXIF data.

The panorama actually looks mostly OK except for the sky, water, and the building to the right that has the images severely rotated. not sure how that happened.

Does anybody know how to solve the water/sky problem? The images for the sky are not detected as being in the panorama, and the boats are detected as being in a different panorama entirely. They move quite fast at 400mm.

Please Kolor Fourms, you're my only hope.

Last edited by inMotion on Mon May 28, 2012 12:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.

[klausesser]

by klausesser » Mon May 28, 2012 12:55 pm

Hi!

Interesting shot!

Set "force each image to be in the same panorama" (or so - i have the german version).

This way the featureless images will be puzzled somewhere - but you can move them by hand to the matching positions or use the wand-tool to guess the positions.
After that you can manually link them. Some effort - but it works.

best, Klaus

[inMotion]

by inMotion » Mon May 28, 2012 4:51 pm

oh MAN! updated to the newest autopano (2.6.3) and loaded up the full res RAW files, all 1500 of them and started up the detection - i got this error.

"close programs to prevent information loss"

Your computer is low on memory. Save your files and close these programs:

Autopano Giga (build 27/07/2012)

So, where do i go from here? - do i need to install more memory, or configure virtual memory differently?

actually, take a look at my VM settings. i also noticed that AGP uses up all my C drive's memory and then caches to the T drive...the VM is set to only 4-6gb. will try setting the windows virtual memory to auto and remove the C drive from AGP's cache and only use the slower non SSD 1gb T drive.

[mediavets]

by mediavets » Mon May 28, 2012 5:12 pm

Shot with canon 5dm2, 100-400 lens at 400 at f.25, 200 shutter speed, iso 640. It took about 3 hours to shoot without a motorized head. (China custom's wont release it for another 20 days - but the project must go on). ...............
Does anybody know how to solve the water/sky problem? The images for the sky are not detected as being in the panorama, and the boats are detected as being in a different panorama entirely. They move quite fast at 400mm.

You could try 'faking' a Papywizard XML data file.

Download the latest version of the Papywizard software, configure it accordingly for you camera type and orientation, lens and shooting pattern (no. of rows and columns and shooting order) and amount of overlap, and the do a 'shoot' in simulation mode to create the data file.

Then use the data file with your images using the APG Papywizard Import wizard.

Download the latest development version of the Papywizard software from here:

http://www.papywizard.org/wiki/Download#Developementversions

If your shooting pattern matches one of those supported for the APG Gigapan Import Wizard you might try that too:

Last edited by mediavets on Mon May 28, 2012 7:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.

[gkaefer]

by gkaefer » Mon May 28, 2012 7:07 pm

You did not mention what your final goal is to achieve... a panorama printed in a magazine, a interactive panorama or even a tour with several such panos or whatever.
from this going backwards I would decide if using RAW images as source for your pano is the correct decision ...

memory and panos: 1500 images a lets asume 15mb = 22gig - so why do you have the idea 16 gig Ram could be sufficient for an flawless and fast working process?
convert your RAW images to tiff if website is goal than 8bit or use jpgs to save far more resources (panotour does take your RAW pano or TIFF pano and creates thousands of jpgs snippets for your online tour, so why not using jpgs from beginning and saving a looooot of time)...

Which Optimization preset did you use? Gigapixel? (hope so...)
what are your settings for "Memory Used" (here by changing settings autopano does calculate for you if your resources are enough...); "Number of CPU's" and "GPU Processing"

using an xml file containing the image positions and other data is always desired for such big panos. sky, water, white wallls etc otherwise allways lead to manually positioning of the images... a horror trip and not always gifted with success. so using a manually head I would suggest to use papywizzard in simulation mode creating a log file with the desired xml data you can use with the import wizard. nearly 100% of your positioning problems of sky and water images will be gone...

free your SSD so you've more than 30gig.
optimoum would be source images on one SSD, destination path another SSD and cache/temp paths on seperate SSDs. if no SSDs available than use seperate Harddrives.

first I would create 50% or 25% jpgs of my raws to test if the pano does work at all. than I woudl use tiffs and I would render with 5% if this works I would choose bigger panossizes. if a 30% render does work and looks great than a 100% render shoudl work too.

Georg

Last edited by gkaefer on Mon May 28, 2012 7:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.

[inMotion]

by inMotion » Mon May 28, 2012 7:48 pm

thanks for the great information Georg!

You're right, me assuming that 16gb is enough is probably quite erroneous. The end result of this panorma will be a zoomable 10 gigapixel panorama using microsoft deep zoom to view it. my only responsibility is to provide the .kro rendered panorama.

I did use the gigapixel optimization. memory used is at 12gb out of 16 and cache division is set to auto. will i see huge benefit from upgrading to 32gb? there are 1600 images at 22mb each. i was also thinking of getting a 256gb SSD just for this project, as my 128gb SSD doesn't seem to be useful as it doesn't have enough space.

how do i use an xml file to determine position? will look more into papywizzard in the morning.

what is the main benefit of using .cr2 raw files vs 8bit or 16bit tiff? would a better workflow be to color correct/sharpen in lightroom and then convert to 8bit tiffs? will autopano have a more difficult time stitching the photos if they have already been adjusted in lightroom?

ideally, i want to have a somewhat HDR look with some tonemapping. i know this can be achieved with just 1 raw image in photomatix, but i have not had good results so far with a test i did. I took a smaller panorama of the same scene (about 120 photos at 100mm zoom) and processed them with photomatix. there were a lot of weird artifacts and once imported into autopano, APG was not able to correctly stitch the images - whereas the raw files rendered fine directly from the camera in autopano.

the image in my first post with the sky and water all screwed up is of a 25% JPG render.

currently, i'm waiting for my raws to decode in APG. it has been about 3 hours and 1/8th finished and has already written about 200GB in cache. i'm not sure what to do about htis, as the drive is filling up.

I hope I can continue to use this thread to troubleshoot this gigapixel panorama here. it's a fun learning process.

Last edited by inMotion on Mon May 28, 2012 7:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.

[gkaefer]

by gkaefer » Mon May 28, 2012 9:44 pm

dont feed autopano with raw files. autopano does convert them internally to tiffs with a dcraw algorithm and you've no influence on what autopano is doing. so use adobe LR or any of the raw converters coming with the camera brand. here you can have far more influence on the result, and you dont need so much resources on your pc. 16gig can handle such panos, but be patient. avoid raws here like said above. use 8bit tiffs for the web ts far enough, if resources are no problem 16bit tiffs are of course perfect (and gives you too more options inside autopano).
photomatix preprocessed images in autopano is standard, widley done and it does work. if the images are only bracketed the results are better than if you do excessive tonemapping. I would not mix to much things. 1600 images & photomatix & tonemapping... many variables and to figure out problems and eliminating them is not possible with such big projects. you've to practice with smaller projects to refine your workflow, otherwhise you spend 20 days with this pano and result is still not satisfiening...
so use tiffs, dont do hdr, use papywizzard to create a logfile where the papywizard is writing the imagepositions. use here the exact values of your manual shot pano like focal, overllap, crop sensor... to keep workflow as clean as possible and to avoid unexpected complications.
why dont you use panotour for the online tour... panotour can automatically handle multiple zoom levles and resolutions...

the final pano cant edited anymore in LR or PS or any other editing software because of size limitations on many frontiers...
so do sharpening before feeding the images to autopano.
you alternativley can create cube faces and postprocess these (krpano tools and panotour can export cubes...)
.kr files... dont know much about it, but isnt it a kolor file format? if yes I doubt microsoft files can handle them and display them correctly. did you try it with smaller panos? cant say this...

"fun learning process".... hopefully its not getting a frustrating process...

Georg

[inMotion]

by inMotion » Tue May 29, 2012 4:22 am

I let AGP run overnight just to "detect" the cr2 RAW panorama - woke up with a full hard drive and memory 99% utilization, and it still wasn't done. Canceled it and will try 8 bit tiff from LR. I'll update on how that goes.

I also took a look at papywizzard - it seems that it is only useful if you have a electronic rotating tripod head. (mine is stuck in customs).

[mediavets]

by mediavets » Tue May 29, 2012 5:31 am

I also took a look at papywizzard - it seems that it is only useful if you have a electronic rotating tripod head. (mine is stuck in customs).

No, as Georg and I have already told you, you can run the Papywizard software in simulation mode - without it being attached to the Merlin/Panohear mount - and it will generate an XML format data file that records the shooting co-ordinate of each 'shot' which, when used with the APG Papywizard Import wizard, will help APG place 'featureless' images - such as those sky images - that would otherwise not be included in the pano.

...............

Which 'electronic rotating tripod head' have you ordered?

[inMotion]

by inMotion » Tue May 29, 2012 5:47 am

http://www.kolor.com/panogear-motorized-panoramic-head.html this one.

what are the main benefits of using 8 or 16 bit tiffs, or even jpgs? (other than some quality loss) - main worry is stitching quality. the 8bit tiffs are 60mb, 16s are 120mb....quite massive. i'm worried that autopano will take forever to just load the files again.

Last edited by inMotion on Tue May 29, 2012 5:48 am, edited 1 time in total.

[lumelix]

by lumelix » Tue May 29, 2012 9:13 am

Hi inMotion
I shot several panos with 1500 images manually without a pano head like you. And first I have the same problems.
But then I try out a workaround, using the Gigapan Import Wizard to set the initial position of everey image near the precise position (see image below).
This way, APG knows the neighboring images already and the detection process is really faster.
I use only JPG's but often needed more than 80 GB Cache for this panos. So I think your free space on the SSD isn't enough. Use a disk with more free space - and use JPGs first.
There is no visible loss of quality for your application in deep zoom!
I only have a three years old Q6700 Intel (@ 3.6 Ghz) with 8 GB RAM and a RAID0-Array. It runs about 2 hours to detect and render a 15 GPix pano.

Last edited by lumelix on Tue May 29, 2012 9:24 am, edited 1 time in total.

[inMotion]

by inMotion » Tue May 29, 2012 1:07 pm

Just got home with 32gb of ram and a 256gb SSD....and i saw on my computer this error.

Was trying to detect the pano with 8bit tiffs. i'm going to try JPGs now.

[inMotion]

by inMotion » Tue May 29, 2012 1:11 pm

Thanks lumelix!!! will check this out. i'm a little worried as we started taking the photos with an down-up left to right, and then about 1/10th of the way switched to right to left, up to down. does that make sense?

i'm hopeful that your advice will work! thanks!!!

[mediavets]

by mediavets » Tue May 29, 2012 1:32 pm

Thanks lumelix!!! will check this out. i'm a little worried as we started taking the photos with an down-up left to right, and then about 1/10th of the way switched to right to left, up to down. does that make sense?

i'm hopeful that your advice will work! thanks!!!

If you switched shooting pattern part way through the shoot then neither the Gigapan Import wizard nor using a Papywizard genarted XML format data file with the Papywizard Import wizard will work.

[klausesser]

by klausesser » Tue May 29, 2012 1:46 pm

No, as Georg and I have already told you, you can run the Papywizard software in simulation mode - without it being attached to the Merlin/Panohear mount - and it will generate an XML format data file that records the shooting co-ordinate of each 'shot' which, when used with the APG Papywizard Import wizard, will help APG place 'featureless' images - such as those sky images - that would otherwise not be included in the pano.

Yes - but you have to shoot manually in *exactly* the same pattern which PW generates as simulation! Don´t know whether that came clear enough . .

best, Klaus

[inMotion]

by inMotion » Tue May 29, 2012 2:52 pm

No, as Georg and I have already told you, you can run the Papywizard software in simulation mode - without it being attached to the Merlin/Panohear mount - and it will generate an XML format data file that records the shooting co-ordinate of each 'shot' which, when used with the APG Papywizard Import wizard, will help APG place 'featureless' images - such as those sky images - that would otherwise not be included in the pano.

Yes - but you have to shoot manually in *exactly* the same pattern which PW generates as simulation! Don´t know whether that came clear enough . .

best, Klaus

yeah, i wasn't aware of this at the time of the shoot though. we wont have another clear day in shanghai until friday it seems.

[mediavets]

by mediavets » Tue May 29, 2012 3:01 pm

yeah, i wasn't aware of this at the time of the shoot though. we wont have another clear day in shanghai until friday it seems.

Perhaps wait for the robotic head before embarking on the next BIG shoot?

Before then why not try something a little less ambitious to learn and develop technique.

Producing high quality gigapixel panos is not simply quantitatively different it is also qualitatively different from shooting smaller panos.

Panoramic imaging does not scale linearly in terms of technical challenge.

Last edited by mediavets on Tue May 29, 2012 3:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.

[lumelix]

by lumelix » Tue May 29, 2012 3:59 pm

Hi inMotion
Your pattern isn't a problem! But you have to rename the images so that they give you one of the available pattern.
I have done this to, because I take one of the panos in two sequences. I sort every row in a folder and then rename all files.
For the gigapan import you must have the pattern with ascending numbers. You have the same problem when your camera switch
from 9999 to 1 while shooting the pano ;-)
I agree with mediavets in the second point!
Try to do this pano with JPG (compress to medium). Downscale the images to 50%, the loss in quality is really small (because of bayer pattern and aliasing filter)
Try first with a subsequence of your pano (eg. the lower rows). So you can see the problems really faster.
And then, with this knowlege, you have a lot of fun doing the big one ;-)

[lumelix]

by lumelix » Tue May 29, 2012 4:03 pm

Is your motherboard capable to handle 32 GB RAM ? Have you set your voltages (RAM, NB, SB) properly ?

[inMotion]

by inMotion » Tue May 29, 2012 4:05 pm

yep yep yep. ram is installed and running well. only CPU multiplier is overclocked (from 35 to 42) it's stable at 44, but just wanted to be on the safe side. bus/ram is at 100mhz and 1.5v.

[inMotion]

by inMotion » Tue May 29, 2012 4:11 pm

Hi inMotion
Your pattern isn't a problem! But you have to rename the images so that they give you one of the available pattern.
I have done this to, because I take one of the panos in two sequences. I sort every row in a folder and then rename all files.
For the gigapan import you must have the pattern with ascending numbers. You have the same problem when your camera switch
from 9999 to 1 while shooting the pano ;-)

The filenames also went from 9999 to 1 on this shoot for me. Can you provide a screenshot of your directory tree? It's a bit hard to visualize what you mean.

Do you mean something like this:

- Row 1 folder
image 1
image 2
etc

- Row 2 folder
image 1
image 2
etc

also, what direction should they be going? for example, should "image 1" refer to the left most or right most? "folder 1" top or bottom? we shot top right to bottom left. do i need to reverse the image naming convention?

[mediavets]

by mediavets » Tue May 29, 2012 6:36 pm

It's a bit hard to visualize what you mean.

The images should be renamed such that the sequence of filenames matches one of the supported shooting patterns.

'Rows; downward' looks like it might be the easiest to emulate.

Last edited by mediavets on Tue May 29, 2012 6:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.

[inMotion]

by inMotion » Tue May 29, 2012 7:28 pm

Followed lumelix's guide as best I could. Converted to JPG, 50% size, 60% quality, and renamed the images. But...

I think I've run into a problem - not every row has the same number of images. Is there a workaround for this, or do I need to reshoot?

or am I doing something else wrong?

[mediavets]

by mediavets » Tue May 29, 2012 7:39 pm

Followed lumelix's guide as best I could. Converted to JPG, 50% size, 60% quality, and renamed the images. But...

I think I've run into a problem - not every row has the same number of images. Is there a workaround for this, or do I need to reshoot?

or am I doing something else wrong?

To have any hope of using the Gigapan Import wizard, or the Papywizard Import wizard for a mosaic pano, you must have a regular matrix/grid shooting pattern, with the same number of images in every row with similar overlapping between each image in the row and similar overlaps between the rows.

Perhaps you can try duplicating some of the 'featureless' sky images - if those are the ones that are 'missing' - so that you have the same number of images in each row?

But it sounds as if these Import wizard workarounds are not going to work for you this time; it may be that the best that can be said of this particular shoot is that you are learning what not to do, but I think that could have been learned an easier way than spending 3 hours shooting 1500 images!

[inMotion]

by inMotion » Tue May 29, 2012 7:50 pm

also, I have no idea how to use papywizard in simulation mode, and i wasn't able to find anything mentioning it in the documentation. Opening the "papywizard-simul" shortcut provides this command prompt.

i'm beat...time for sleep. thanks for all the input guys!