Lascolor not accepting a merged tif

[James Carracher]

Hi,

This is a question that is really related to another piece of software (FME), but it is for the .tif input into lascolor.

So I have multiple overlapping rasters I wish to use as an input. The overlapping parts are identical. As you can only have 1 raster at a time I have merged them together in FME.

That is all easy but I’m having a little trouble getting it to work. It seems that lastools doesn’t like the merging transformer in FME. The input (pre merged) rasters work fine, and even clipped rasters. So it’s not necessarily my output settings from FME. But a raster merging the lot together doesn’t work. I can’t see any difference in properties between ones that work and a merged raster.

The combined raster I am having trouble with is not a big raster (its 2-ish-GB in size) and the coordinate system information is all identical. 

I am getting this error

 

With a script like this

Lascolor64 --i LAZ\test.laz ^

-imagedir IMAGES ^

-odir OUT ^

-olaz ^

-cores 24

Does anyone know what’s going on?

[Jochen Rapidlasso]

Hi James,

the error message speaks for itself:

You run into a limit with your TIFF file.

So your resulting TIFF file is just too big for lascolor64 or already FME gets a problem writing monster TIFFs.

TIFF files in general are 32Bit organized. We have the plan to support BigTIFF someday which can handle larger files. 

We should not deeper into this issue - the only REAL solution is to work with tiled files and just put the result together at the final end.
It seems you have this single files and merge them using FME?

Why not use this TIFF tiles to work with lascolor? Then also your "-cores" option would work and you would save error messages and a lot of time :)

Best,

Jochen @rapidlasso

[James Carracher]

Thanks for the reply Jochen,

I've never looked into TIF files that much, or used lascolor. I didn't know what the error message was about
I thought big TIFF was really files above 4GB (This is less than that). I didn't know if could be less than that too according to the wikipedia link you sent. I did not specify this in FME
I'll work out some magic to clip the images to some tiled files (Which they generally are, but this test file I was using was a flightline instead). To do this I'd like to know, are there any other hard restrictions that lascolor will not accept? I'm guess not compression in the TIFF. Are the number of pixels an issue?

James