Panorama stitching - computer hanging

[Bololoco]

I am stitching together a large panorama out of 30+ high definition pictures on an old i5 laptop.....now I know it's a bit old for such a task but it's kinda doing it, albeit slowly. 

I started the render process the night before lastt and by this morning it had worked its way through 2/3's of the process but the progress bar has been hanging ever since. In fact, I think it may have ground to a halt. 

If it completes, it's probably going to end up as a 2gb file, so I didn't expect it to be particularly quick but it's definitely slower than I expected.

I did one a few nights ago and it stitched and rendered a 460mb file in about 6 hours, hence me going for a larger file this time.

 

Is there any way I can check to see if it's still working its way through the render or is there anything else I can do to jolt it back into life?

[NotMyFault]

I would scale down (a copy of) the images by factory 1/16 and measure the time. I didn't measure specifically sticking performance, but most operations are linear to pixel count as best case. This can give you a good estimate how long it will take for higher resolution images.

And you need to stay well away from you RAM limit. If the file needs more RAM than available, this can slow down everything by factor 1.000 or more.

 

us task manager (Windows) or Activity Monitor (MacOS) to inspect RAM utilisation. 

 

You can create a batch job to scale down to automate that job.

[Bololoco]

Yeah, I think the problem is my RAM. I only have 8gb and it's crawling. I looked in the task manager and it's still processing, so that's good to know but i've had to close down everything except Affinity and the task manager.

I've also had to fire up my spare laptop to type this message.

One thing i'd like to know is how Affinity uses the RAM and CPU to process everything?

RAM use fluctuates between 86 and 97%, so i'm guessing that it processes so much, then discards that to process some more. (by the time I typed this message, it went down to 76%)

The CPU is also showing occasional spikes, fluctuating between 5% and 45% and now power usage is fluctuating between LOW and VERY HIGH.

Disk is staying at a steady 50%

 

I'm just hoping that it manages to complete....it's going to be a stunning panorama

[Bololoco]

Blinking heck....I think it's done it.....almost 48 hours later....i've still got the spinning wheel and the "not responding" message but that should clear......must make sure I save it asap

[Bololoco]

I should really ask this elsewhere but how many computers can I run AFF PHOT on? It would be handy to have it on both laptops

[PaulEC]

For personal use you can install it on any/all computers that you “control”.  (Assuming they are the same OS, unless you have the Universal Licence for the whole suite!)

[Bololoco]

Hey Paul, thanks for answering. I'd since read the licensing agreement so kinda figured that out, although there's so much legal jargon in that document that it could easily mean the opposite of what you think it says.

I didn't want to buy the universal license in case I didn't get on with the software. 

Also, I have previously been a webplus customer and wasn't that impressed with their attitude to us customers so didn't really want to give them more money but they're one of the only ones in the game who haven't gone for the monthly subscription thing

[Bololoco]

Well I managed to render everything, although the Affinity files ended up being a lot larger than I expected. I had somehow managed to choose 2 different panoramas, 1 file ended up at 1.5gb, the other was a whopping 7.5gb and my 10 yr old i5 elitebook with 8gb RAM worked its way through the lot.

I thought i'd lost everything as I had I had get some sleep after I started saving the largest panorama first and when I checked it at 5am, Affinity Photo had disappeared.....i checked in the save folder and there it was. I fired up Aff Phot again and it recovered the other unsaved panorama, so I saved that, which means I lost absolutely nothing.

Well done Hewlett Packard and Serif. I am stunned and just a little bit in awe of what they've accomplished. 

Now I can't even look at the larger file on my own computer without buying some more RAM but i'll upload the smaller panorama if anyone wishes to look at it.

Sadly, the stitching isn't perfect. I remember my dog knocked the tripod and camera over as I was talking to someone, which would account for some of the misaligment. I also used pixel shift mode to get the highest resolution out of each image, which may in itself have caused some softening to the distant detail but it's worth it in my eyes......so if anyone wants to see a vista of Plymouth, feel free and enjoy. It's a JPEG, so much smaller than the AFF PHOTO file it came from but there's still plenty of things to look at if you zoom in.

[NotMyFault]

Thank you for sharing this epic story. Most users are just too impatient to wait for an App to finish.

i see some room for improvement in methodology:

• the raw images contain some blue spots (lens flare). Suggest to preprocess the raw files (develop to tiff/16), and inpaint those areas. Otherwise, they will irritate the stitching algorithms 
• better don’t use pixel shift. You scene contains clouds, water, and ships on the water. Those moving objects will become unnest blurry, and again irritate the stitching process. 
• the image overall looks blurry. Again, pre-process the images an apply a mild sharpening (excluding sky and water)
• when shooting in nature in cloudy days, lightness can change dramatically between shots. Try to capture the image in shortest possible time, without rushing. Try to start the process when either no clouds covering the scene, or a big cloud stays until you have taken all images.
•  

[Bololoco]

Thanks @NotMyFault 

This isn't the first panorama i've pieced together but it is the first one with pixel shifting....i was ust looking to see how it came out, although I didn't intend it to be such an arduous task, i'm glad i've done it all the same.

You're right about pixel shifting creating blur....i've been doing a lot of it lately and there's always some minor motion in between shots. Also, each panorama took about 4-5 minutes to complete, partly because pixel shifting is done in camera and there's at least a 10 second gap before you can take the next one. I didn't particularly hang around though but this was purely an experiment to see how far I can push the process and I think I definitely pushed it too far.

 

Here's my first attempt at panoramas, taken a couple of weeks ago during a holiday in Padstow. Other than the dog on an ownerless lead and the fact that somestranger is in the picture 4 times, it's come out quite well with plenty of sharpness.

 

Now you mention processing each RAW individually, is there a particular method to match the general colour balance or does AFF PHOTO do all that in the stitchng process?

The above panorama of Plymouth was incredibly patchy as far as exposure goes but the final product looks quite even.