My Autopano Pro forum

May I suggest:  opening and editing these images in an editor (PS), should be your concern.

2 hours to capture 30+ gigapixel images.
2 days max to stitch and render.
The number of images, bit depth, and camera used will exponentially affect your editing time.  And I'm not talking about extreme environmental changes: moving clouds and their corresponding shadows for example.
I usually render many versions of and image and layer them in PS.   I capture and render in 16bit.  Long captures will require  the latitude 16 bit can offer.
I have triple boot mac pros (osx, win 7, and fedora)
Two 8 striped raids w mini sas connectors.  Read and write @ 700MB/sec
One for writing data and one for scratch. I also have many terabytes of raid 5 for the images and finished projects that run 400MB/sec.  All drives mount in all operating systems.
Depending on the raid card and drivers, performance can tip in the favor of both mac and win.   APG is much faster on the mac, while PSx64 is only available, for the time being, on windows.
Get as much ram as you can afford and use a compatible motherboard that you can add ram you cannot afford now.  This will allow for a longer life of the computer.   Also, ram will get cheaper, until the machine is so old that supply is limited.
Fast drives require fast data processing and lots of memory for efficient use.

A bit off topic, but Seagate just came out with a 2TB disk with a 6GB/s SATA interface.

Adding my $.02

Regarding Mac ....work on one daily, its not the 8 core,but the 4 core. The OSX 10.5 ...what is this, the 5th beta version of OSX? OSX an advanced OS? hmm...more advanced then the previous version for sure. Is it more advanced then Windows? which windows 3.11? yes for sure, even XP, but its not more stable IMHO...meaning I can crash this more often then I care to count.

It also seems that Mac causing tunnel vision (read. narrow minded view), it is in particular evident in artistic people, with little to no knowledge of computers and how they work. But someone who once made an impression on them, caused this to happen, when they said, only a Mac can be used for graphics and artistic expression in the digital world. This was certainly the case 8-10 or so years ago. Windows was for the masses, the office tasks, running trivia tasks. The Mac was and has almost always been aimed at the creative field, and it was the champion.. read WAS.

The playing field is even out today, Mac no longer has the upper hand. Therefore one should not choose MAC over Windows for this reason, rather for other reason, such as I like the way the Apple behaves/morals vs. X? vs. Micro$oft. Or perhaps the way your keyboard shortcuts are often at a shorter distance then on the windows version. Or you like the the way the finder is structured. Or simply because the Mac is the most sexy looking computer today... no denying this.

Would I buy one myself? ...I have thought about it several times. There are things that I really like, color coding the folders and files, the way the finder can be view in the column view. I used to like how you could get all the applications to minimise on the desktop...it was way cool (last seen on windows Vista, but not first)

Probably the most stable Windows OS would be Windows Server 2008, it has better memory management then its younger Vista and 7, AFAIK. but is it perfect...NO, far from.

A PC/Windows workstation build like the Macpro isn't going to be cheap, in many ways the Macpro represent good value, if you are happy to be locked in, to a limited selection of hardware and software choices.

Merging the two platforms may create the best option, but we are a few years away from that :-) LOL

Until then, choose your weapon carefully, but just remember, they are both tools and to some windows fits better in the hand, to others...well, there isn't a wrong choice if you are happy with what you choose.

So to get back to OP, then I would recommend a Windows PC, because that is what you asked for.

Choose between Supermicro or Tyan workstation mainboards, for dual processors.
Get the pair of CPU's that fits your budget
as much ram that fits in your budget
unfortunately there isn't any really good looking PC cases like the Mac, but then the PC cases are limited to just 4 hard drives :-)
so Lian Li would be my choice or Chenbro
Intel SSD drives, yes you know the one's for OS and apps, some for scratch disk, some for swap file ..RAID0 configs
Some Black WD or the new Seagates for longer term storage in a minimum raid1 configs
Graphics cards...not sure if any of the stitching programs supports SLI or Multiple graphics cards - so the best card you money can buy
OS> Windows Server 2008

Now for the single most important thing when working with images, in particular color images....THE MONITOR!!!! with its faithful friend the Xrite iOne or better

Monitor, well we are making panos so 26" or bigger and even better a pair of them.

I would recommend NEC Spectraview 2690 series or 3090

It might stitch nicely but if the colors are shit, you have wasted your time

good luck

Henrik

PS: feel free to comment on the Mac vs PC :-) or do something more useful with your time :-) they are just tools!

Paul wrote:

some testresults on different machines:
http://hdview.at/speedtest/results.html

Just ONE iMac running 10.5.8 . . .

10.6.2 is the actual (64bit) system and 27" iMacs have 4 cores.
Would be interesting to compare 8 core Mac Pros with internal Level 0 RAID and 16/32GB RAM.

best, Klaus

Latest build from Helmut Dersch seems pretty fast when it comes to stitching: http://webuser.hs-furtwangen.de/~dersch … herNG.html

337 x 6 MPixel ------->1433 MPixel cylinder in 250 sec (4min 10 sec) on Intel Celeron 1.8GHz, 1 GByte ram, Nvidia GeForce GTX 285, OpenSUSE 11.1

As you've selected a MB with SATA 6gbps, now you can have an actual drive that utilizes the faster bus.
http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/3118/c … ndex4.html

"At this point in time there is no other drive, platter or solid state that is in the same league as the Crucial RealSSD C300."

And it's cheap too - I'm hearing 400$ for 128GB!

thavis wrote:

hankkarl wrote:

A bit off topic, but Seagate just came out with a 2TB disk with a 6GB/s SATA interface.

Hi hankkarl, this is ON topic!

Would you prefer this new seagate over two WD black (raid0)?

Peter

Compared to similar drives (including WD 2TB Black) http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/866/1

Compared to Velociraptor and SSDs: http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?o … mitstart=2

Not much different than a WD Black Drive, both 2TB drives have 64MB cache.  WD has a 29% advantage in access time, Seagate had a little better transfer time.

The Velociraptor has an advantage over the Seagate, but not as much as you'd think. 

With APP, the number of disks matter.  If you have one disk, the random access time may be more important because of head seeks.  If you have many disks, then the sustained transfer rate is more important.

Conclusion:  Either drive will do, and perform ok.  But the WD Black with 6GB/s SATA I/F should be better.  See http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?DriveID=733

Last edited by hankkarl (2010-02-08 03:16:56)

Hosted rendering seems an interesting idea and it's plausible, now with most of the services in the cloud like Amazon AC2, S3, SimpleDB, etc... However I suppose the cost will be significantly higher, especially with the tons of traffic this services is going to need. Also, if you have to upload your images for 20 hours and then download the pano 10 more hours, and wait in queue for the stitch to happen, it kinda makes you wonder does it really make sense? Still, worth looking into.