pix 4d ag processing time

I recently rented pix4d ag program. I was very disillusioned to discover that to process 4500 pictures (50 acre field) for later upload to micasense atlas took 4-5 hours on a 3.5ghz intel i5 with 16b of memory and a ssd. Then comes another 4 hrs to upload ….so a total of 9-10 hrs for a 50 acre field. Since I had hoped to do 5 – 6 fields (larger than this) per day I can’t see how it works for me. What am I missing unless someone invents 60 hour days. Any suggestions?

Hey Tim,
Based on my experience, 4-5 hours processing time for 4500 pictures 50 acre field seems pretty reasonable.

At that time frame how are you suppose to be able to cover any acres, it would take months to process images I take in a few days?

There is no way to speed up any of this process? Farmers can not wait weeks to get images back, that is defeating the purpose of this device.

Hey Tim,

There are few things that I know may help you. You can try different processing options like changing the image scale to 0.5 is one of them. You may have to process them in multiple machines. You can shoot me and email if you like my email is selim.erguden@gmail.com, I may be able to help you more via email.

I have spent up to 3 weeks processing 1 golf hole…and I have one of the fastest Pix4D machines on the planet. When I change my flight plan to reduce pictures and change settings in Pix4D then it can be just a few days. The increase in gigapixels creates an exponential increase in Pix4D time, but it also depends a lot on your settings. 4500 pictures in less than a day is actually very good and I can’t imagine delivering results in 1-2 days is a deal breaker.

The solution to meet customer timelines is to buy multiple machines to process faster, and mine is a $7,000 beast. Having the processing power to meet the average weekly flying rate is a major part of the business plan and the main calculation in my quoting spreadsheet.

Thank you @Selim @Adam for your detailed explanation. @Tim did you have a chance to test the previous given here?

@Tim My first recommendation if you intend to model such a large area is to divide the area into smaller subprojects. More here about large projects: https://support.pix4d.com/hc/en-us/articles/202558579

Additionally, since I suppose you are interested in reflectance maps if after step 1 the automatic tie points are dense enough you could skip step 2 and process only step 3. 

Could you try and let us know how it went?

Cheers,

Ina