| Author |
Message |
    
Frank Grages
New member
Username: Frank_grages
Post Number: 10
Registered: 7-2007
| | Posted on Sunday, September 30, 2007 - 11:08 am: |   |
Itīs me again with another problem...
With my new panoramic head itīs very comfortable to create full spheric panoramas using the tutorial for mulit-row panoramas.
Last week, I shot some photos in a very high room. My wide-angle lens was not "wide-angle-ish" ;-) enough to cover all 180 degrees (vertical) with 3 rows so I decided to capture a fourth row.
I managed to stitch the lower, middle and upper row, but PF completely fails to stitch the images for the 4th "steep upper" row.
The rows were shot with a vertical tilt of -45° | 0° | + 45° | +75°
Should there be the same percentage of vertical rotation between every row or ist it not necessary?
Due to the steep upwards angle, the overlap of the images is quite big, so maybe this might cause the stitching problems. I can place up to 9 stitching points without getting a result (coloured dots indicating the quality of the stichting points)
I could post 2 sample images of the pre-stitched fotos, if useful.
Best regards
-Frank |
John Strait
Moderator
Username: Jstrait
Post Number: 326
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Sunday, September 30, 2007 - 3:52 pm: | |
Hi Frank,
I have waited two years for someone to ask this question! :-)
Yes, there are limits built into the stitcher. I found that some limits were necessary. Without the limits, the stitcher would sometimes find solutions that made the stitching points match, but were not sensible. This is especially problematic when the tilt angle is large enough that the top or bottom of the images go beyond far the zenith (straight up) or nadir (straight down).
I built limits into the stitcher and set them to default values that seemed sensible to me. Fortunately, it's possible to change the limits, and this may provide a way to solve your problem.
The default limit values are:
| parameter | minimum | maximum | | | Focal length | 5.0 | 1000.0 | millimeters | | Barrel correction | -0.2 (-20%) | 0.2 (20%) | | | Pitch angle | -60.0 | 60.0 | degrees | | Roll angle | -30.0 | 30.0 | degrees |
Plus-or-minus 60 degrees for the pitch angle seemed like a safe range when V4.0 was released. At the time, it seemed unlikely that anyone would tilt the camera more than 45 degrees. Of course, that was before people started using The Panorama Factory for multi-row stitching. :-)
Your pitch angle, 75 degrees, is outside the limits. Therefore, The Panorama Factory is unable to find the solution. But you can experiment with changing the limits to see if it helps. I would suggest setting the pitch angle limits to plus-or-minus 80 degrees. I would not recommend anything larger than that. Setting the limits close to 90 degrees is asking for trouble!
To change the limits, you need to write certain values into the Windows registry. I'm attaching a .reg file that contains the default values. By editing this file and then double-clicking it, you can change the limits to any values you want to try.
If you decide to try this, please report back here to the forum with your results. As I wrote earlier, changing the limits can sometimes lead to surprising and undesirable results. I'm interested in whether increasing the limits to plus-or-minus 80 degrees will allow you to stitch your fourth row and still give you good results for the other rows.
Caution: Be careful how you set the values. If you set them to impossible values (for example setting the maximum smaller than the minimum) or to overly restrictive ranges, you may prevent the stitcher from finding a solution. To set the limits back to their default values, just set them to the empty string: "". |
Frank Grages
New member
Username: Frank_grages
Post Number: 11
Registered: 7-2007
| | Posted on Tuesday, October 02, 2007 - 5:37 pm: | |
Hi John,
I changed the values for the pitch angles to -80 / + 80 degrees.
Now, I can stitch the last row without any errors or distorsions. But when I tried to stitch the fourth row to the first three rows, I managed to produce an "Out of Memory"-Error.
As you know, I run the 64-Bit-Edition of PF so I assume that itīs NOT a limitation of the software.
The pictures I want to stitch are *huge* and so is the whole project (about 19 GB). The pictures are about 22,000 x 8,600 pixel (the 3 rows) plus 22,000 x 3,000 pixel (row 4). When I save the 3-row-image, the resulting file is a 1.07 GB TIFF file (saved without layers).
I think the error message might be caused by a lack of RAM (Iīve got 4 GB installed).
I will try to save the two images still to be stitched in 2 files and open a new project in which Iīll try to stitch them together without having the overhead of the whole project. Maybe that works.
Thatīs by far the largest project Iīve done with PF and it took several minutes for my computer to analyze the 2 stitching points between these big images...I think, itīs time for a computer upgrade ;-)
Is PF capable of using more than 2 Processor Cores? If so, a Quadcore Machine with 8 GB would be a big advantage...
Best regards
-Frank |
John Strait
Moderator
Username: Jstrait
Post Number: 329
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Tuesday, October 02, 2007 - 5:49 pm: | |
I'm glad to know that changing the pitch angle limits helped!
RAM is not the limiting factor for the "out of memory" error. The limiting factors are
(1) 32-bit version of Windows have a 2 GB or 3 GB limit. But this does not apply to you.
(2) All applications running on Windows share the same page file. If your page file is less than 4 GB, I would recommend increasing it to 6 or 8 GB. The "Out of Memory" error is produced on x64 when the page file becomes full.
Of course, the amount of RAM will affect the speed of the application. Swapping data between the page file and RAM is much slower than keeping everything in RAM!
PF will use all processor cores the computer has. I have tested with 8 cores (the largest computer I have access to), but it can theoretically use more. Of course, there is a diminishing return because of overhead. 2 cores don't run quite 2x. 4 cores run somewhat less than 4x. And so on.
Anyway, I suggest you try increasing the page file size before you run out and spend more money! |
Frank Grages
New member
Username: Frank_grages
Post Number: 12
Registered: 7-2007
| | Posted on Wednesday, October 03, 2007 - 8:40 am: | |
Hi John,
I finally made it to finish the project. I increased the page file size up to 8 GB (the size was 6 GB), and I could stitch the images without any further errors.
Stitching together the last 2 parts of the panorama was a very time consuming progcess. It took 65 minutes from placing the two stitching points to saving the resulting panorama to hard disk. (Athlon 64X2 4800+ | 4 GB RAM | Win Vista 64).
My computer upgrade will come for sure, maybe in spring next year. So there is a bit more time to save money for the upgrade - not to forget the next version of PF ;-)
The panorama was shot in a museum. If I get the OK from the managers, I will show it in the gallery.
Best regards
-Frank |
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Registry file to set stitching limits
