Dear Stitchers,
I have been using pretty extensively Autopano Giga 2.5 RC and I am very impressed so far. The speed is amazing, it can typically complete a 300 megapixel pano from 23 D3x images in about 6 mins end to end with less than 10 users clicks (everything was fully automated). This test was performed with the highest possible quality settings.
- opening of 23 150 Mb 16 bits tiff files (from external SCSI320 Raid 5 unit): 20 sec
- pre-processing (control point matching and projection): less than 2 mins
- rendering and saving of resulting 4.8 GB 16 bits tiff file (to same external raid unit): 3:30 mins
-> total time: less than 6 mins.
This is on a 3.5 years old Mac pro with 8 cores and 32 GB ram. The cores matter since APG is able to use 4 of them during anti-ghosting and all 8 during blending.
A small version of the image can be seen behind the link below. I have been unable to find any issue with ghosting on this averagely challenging image (there was very little wind).
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bernardlanguillier/5320072238/sizes/o/I consider 6 mins to be negligible in a typical workflow towards a final high quality printable image for fine art applications.
For what it is worth, PTgui Pro 9.0 is also much improved compared to previous releases and I would advice anybody serious about stitching to try both.
For either of these softwares, I don't know any other way to spend so little money so well in any other area of photography.
Cheers,
Bernard
