HDR panorama getting hung up at tone mapping.

[todd]

I'm running a test using the PTGui Pro 9.1.2 trial version.

My panorama contains 15 columns x 11 rows x 5 exposures, shot with a
Canon G10 mounted to a Gigapan 100. My system is a 3.4GHz Core i7 iMac
with 16GB of ram, a 256GB SSD, and a 1TB HD.

http://ge.tt/9EiiiOA

The problem I'm running into is that I set PTGui to stitch at night,
and it gets all the way through to about 85% completion on the
progress bar, then hangs indefinitely at "Tone mapping...". I had this
happen the first time stitching directly from PTGui. It got to 85% in
sometime under 8 hrs while i was sleeping, then I let it run for 24
hrs from there with no additional progress before i chose to press
"Stop".

On a second try, I went back and was more diligent with setting
control points (average cp distance: 1.079), set the output resolution
to be significantly less than the maximum, and ran through the Batch
Stitcher in the hopes of at least capturing an error message, but I'm
hung up again at tone mapping. PTGui has not written out the HDR file
in either case, so I do not have even partial output.

I have high hopes that this will finally be the tool that works for
me, especially with the Align to Grid setting, but I need to get
unstuck from here. If the dialog box reported 48hrs to go or some
such, I would cheerfully wait, but absent that kind of feedback, it
definitely seems like something is wrong.

Please help...

-Todd

[PTGui Support]

Hi Todd,

The PTGui tone mapper is quite slow for large panoramas. You can be
quite sure that it isn't hanging but I have no idea how long it would take.

I have two alternatives:
- if you don't need the actual HDR file, use Exposure Fusion instead of
Tone Mapping. This may also take some time for large panoramas, but it's
probably faster
- Or output only the .hdr or .exr file and do not tone map right away.
The resulting file can be tone mapped in other software e.g. Photoshop
or Photomatix.

A faster tone mapper is on the wish list.

Joost

[todd]

Hi Joost-

I let it go while waiting for your reply and the second attempt did in
fact finish with no errors. I have a couple of minor stitching errors
(should be easily corrected) and some ghosting to work out. From here
I will try exporting just the HDR as you mention. Also, I would like
to try exporting an 8-bit stitch for each of the 5 exposures in the
stack (if I'm going to Photomatix, I might as well let it try the data
both ways). Is there a fast way to set that up in a batch?

Thanks,

-Todd

[todd]

I see now that that was a silly question. Nevermind. :)

-Todd

[PTGui Support]

That's not a silly question at all.
If you set PTGui to output 'LDR blend planes' (see the create panorama tab) you'll get 5 panoramas which you can merge in Photomatix.

Joost

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