Stitching on Macbook pro laptops

[sbay]

The MBP has a memory limit of 16GB. I'm wondering for those who do stitching and have very big files, at what point does the 16GB become a limitation?

I'm asking because I'm due to upgrade my computers and I'm trying to figure out if the MBP will be fine for the foreseeable future, or if i'll need a solution with more RAM. Currently I do my stitching on a 10GB Ram 2008 mac pro and haven't had any problems but my stitching would usually be 5-10 images (from 5dii) with resulting file size less than 1GB. But I'd like to know if I got a higher MP camera or increased the number of base images when I'd start having problems.

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

The MBP has a memory limit of 16GB. I'm wondering for those who do stitching and have very big files, at what point does the 16GB become a limitation?

Hi Stephen,

It should not be a limitation, because good dedicated stitching applications use lots of tricks to reduce memory consumption, thus allowing to stitch hundreds of images with limited memory. For some operations they may make 8-b/ch copies (sometimes even B/W or bi-tonal) to do some of the calculations on, or reduced size versions. Then most of the number crunching only involves lists with coordinates that consume a fraction of the memory of an image file. Finally, and that's where the memory will be needed, there is the blending stage, but that's also where you are often limited by the maximum TIFF file size of 2 or 4 GB for the final file.

More memory will just reduce the need for these programs to swap intermediate calculation products to disk, and will therefore benefit in speed of execution more than allowing larger sizes.

Cheers,
Bart

[sbay]

Bart -- thanks for the detailed response. That was very helpful.

[MrSmith]

get a scratch disk. either external SSD on a retina MBP or internal in the media bay on MBP's makes a big difference.

[KirbyKrieger]

I stitch 24 MP files in PS-CC on a 15", early-2013 rMBP with 16 GB RAM and a 500 GB SSD (on which I keep close to 100 GB free) and have seen no performance issues.  YMMV, of course, but judging from some of the other responses, it shouldn't.