Script efficiency, las or las?

[James Carracher]

Hi,

This is something I've had in the back of my mind for a long time, but its never really been that important so I haven't bothered looking into it.

For context, I have a few scripts with 5-20 steps that involve lastools. I frequently run these on groups of point clouds (tiled) that add up to say 50-100GB of laz files. My scripts use laz the whole way through. So I guess there are multiple times where the laz is uncompressed and then recompressed. That is if I have misunderstood what happens when you read in a laz vs a las

My question is, would I see any efficiency (run time) gains if I instead left everything as las and wrote to laz in the final step? And would they be significant? Ignore the extra filesize (I delete that as I go)

Cheers