[ptx] Hugin for OS X problems

[Hal V. Engel]

Dennis,

When stitching panos that are made up of a larger number of images you will 
use a lot of system resources.  I have done 360 degree stitches with hugin 
but it does take a long time to run and it needs a fair amount of diskspace.  
My only 360 degree stitch had 8 17 megapixel images that created a 360x74 
degree pano.  On my amd64 3500 machine running everything in 64 bit mode it 
took it most of the night to complete the stitch and I am sure that it used 
lots of diskspace but I don't know how much.  Having 4 gig free while doing 
large stitches is probably marginal at best and I normally have at least 15 
to 20 gig free on the drive I use for this.

Doing these larger panoramas is pushing the limits of both the hardware and 
the software.  When doing these large stitches it is best to make sure that 
you have significantly more diskspace than needed.  Because if you don't it 
will fail only after running for hours which is a real bummer.

Since you are just getting started you should probably be working with smaller 
images at this time.  There is a significant learning curve to using these 
tools and when working with very large stitches you magnify that learning 
curve.  A 12 image stitch should probably wait until you have a least a 
handful of smaller stitches under your belt.  Go in the back yard or down the 
street and shot some 3 or 4 image panos to help learn more about the tools.

Yes it is normal for your CPU to be maxed out while an image is being 
stitched.  This is an extremely CPU intensive task.  As to what affect hiding 
Hugin has I can't offer any insights.

Hal 

On Thursday 03 November 2005 01:44 pm, Denis Héraud wrote:
> After having several issues stitching two images together, I'm now on
> the right track! Last night I tried to stitch 12 images together into
> a 360 degree panorama.
>
> The issue I've got now is two-fold:
>
> The first is that while stitching this panorama, Hugin, and my whole
> system as well, becomes all but completely unresponsive. I can move
> the mouse but hardly anything else. My processor is maxed-out. Is
> this behavior normal? Also, I've noticed that the problem is
> alleviated when I hide Hugin, but I'm thinking it is either slowing
> down the progress of the stitching or stopping it altogether, can
> anyone offer any insight on this?
>
> Second is that I only have about 4GB of HD space free on this
> computer, and when I got up this morning I had a system error message
> telling me my hard disk was running out of space... Is this normal as
> well?? I have to have 4GB free in order to stitch a panorama of this
> size?! Of course when I tried to open the stitched images, the files
> were corrupted, probably because Hugin did not have any space to
> finish the job.
>
> Any insight would be greatly appreciated!
>
> Cheers!
>
> Denis Heraud
>
> (Mac OS X 10.4.3, iBook G4 933mhz 640MB DDR SDRAM)