My Autopano Pro forum

Hi Mediavets,
For my (infrequent) panos, I use a Fuji S5 with Nikon 10.5, 50 1.8 and 105 Micro. Most panos would be made up of 20-40 images at 12 Mpixel, if starting from RAW, or 5 times that amount if starting from bracketed JPGs.
A few times I have taken it a step further, by taking 3 or 4 different focus settings. In that case, it's first to Photomatix, then to Helicon Focus, and finally to Autopano Pro. That of course is not a very efficient workflow, and I have great expectations for Autopano 2.0 Giga . If it works out the way I understand it, it will allow us to do all these things "in house", and hopefully quite fast.
Of course, nobody buys a computer in function of just one program... I do quite a lot of real estate photography, and there Photomatix first has to crunch through 20 to 30 sets of bracketed shots before I adjust colour, perspective, levels, and apply sharpening... Speeding up all those repetitive steps should save me a lot of time.

It would be easy to overspend on the graphics card. For photoshop CS4 they take advantage of 512mb or 1gb of memory (not necessarily required but helpful for big images) but the speed of the card is not very important (any modern mid range card will do great). I can't speak to APP's use of the GPU

foundation wrote:

It would be easy to overspend on the graphics card. For photoshop CS4 they take advantage of 512mb or 1gb of memory (not necessarily required but helpful for big images) but the speed of the card is not very important (any modern mid range card will do great). I can't speak to APP's use of the GPU

How long do you expect to use the PC?  My guess is that programs will start to use the graphics card features more and more.  CS5 and CS6 and CS7 will probably each use more and more of it.

On the other hand, I've added RAM and Disk, and am considering a processor upgrade and a new video card.  $100 in RAM here, $100 for a faster processor there, .... pretty soon I could buy a new system.  While the price of more capable PCs is very low, the software is the issue--I have to buy Windows pro (for networking) and Office, and a bunch of other apps..... And then there is the cost of setting everything up....

Last edited by hankkarl (2008-10-28 16:08:21)

Tried open office, its not bad, but not as good as MS products.  Sure, if all you're doing is some elementary word processing, its ok (although my kids hate it compared to MS word). 

The open office spreadsheet again is ok for simple stuff, but adding macros and such, its not compatible with excel.

But if you have to do complex Access stuff, the open office db seems to be lacking.
Powerpoint had no equivelant--the open office version is much more difficult to use.

Gimp?  not even close to PS CS3.  And what about all the other apps from Adobe?  What's the free version of Dreamweaver?  Aftereffects? Premier? Fireworks?  Flash? Illustrator? 

There is both an initial cost and a royalty to using the free stuff.  But its paid in time, not money.  As you mention, the setup costs time (or money if you hire someone to do it).  The use of the programs costs more time than the use of the commercial offerings.  For example, you can crank out a website with nothing but a text editor, but its a lot faster with a tool like Dreamweaver.  And the integration of the Adobe products makes you even more productive.

As the man in the commercial (the guy selling oil changes) said "you can pay me now, or you can pay me later."

Edit:  Oh yea, one more thing.  There are free pano stitchers.  But none are as good as APP.

Last edited by hankkarl (2008-10-29 13:41:56)

Thanks to you all...