very long processing time

PIX4Dmapper PIX4Dmapper Questions/Troubleshooting
1

I´ve been trying to process an area of 1500 hectares. The area is composed by 6000 photos taken by a drone ebee. I started the process 8 days ago and it haven´t finished yet. The process is being undertaken in a very strong computer but still I don´t know why it is taking me so long!

Below I summarize the characteristics of the project and the processing machine.

Project

Area = 1500 hectares

Number of photos = 6000

Front overlap = 80

Side overlap = 70

Intended pixel size = 5cm/pixel

Computer

Processor = Intel® Core™ i7-5930K Processor (15M Cache, up to 3.70 GHz)

RAM = HyperX Savage 64GB (8 x 8GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 2400 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820104656)

Video = PNY Quadro K4200 VCQK4200-PB 4GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 Workstation

Hard Disk = Kingston SHSS37A/960G 2.5" 960GB SATA III

Hard Disk 2 = Western Digital WD2001FASS 2 TB Caviar Black SATA 3 GB/s 7200 RPM 64 MB Cache

Hard Disk 3 = Western Digital WD2001FASS 2 TB Caviar Black SATA 3 GB/s 7200 RPM 64 MB Cache

Please could anyone give a hint to make this project to run faster?

2

Same here. I am evaluating the trial and not too impressed for the context of a farmer wanting to use this software. I followed guidelines listed here: https://support.pix4d.com/hc/en-us/articles/204191535-Processing-Speed#gsc.tab=0

32GB of RAM, 8 threads and running on NVIDIA 780 - on lowest mesh and point cloud densities and still its been two days so I just cancelled my processing. Agisoft runs the same image set in 4 Hours on the same rig.  

I tried putting it into sub-projects Edgar- maybe you could try that? Its been going for half a day though using sub-projects and still its on the Initial Processing Stage. 

Supposedly Pix4d runs much faster if it runs sub projects of around 200 pictures each… Hopefully someone from Pix4D can help because these forums aren’t very active it seems. 

 

Alex

3

With the new version 2. I am finding the processing speed slower then the version 1 not what was advertised for the new version. I hope Pix updates soon also more errors and fails in ver2 at this time restarting processing 16 gig mem with 8 threads available for processing 750 pics.

is there anyway to revert to the previous version

 

4

Hi All,

@EDGAR: thank you for sharing information about your project and hardware specification.

The workstation you are using is very good but keep in mind that the dataset of 6000 is considered as a large project and we advise the users to split it in subprojects as described here: https://support.pix4d.com/hc/en-us/articles/204700835 This will speed up the Step 1.

@EDGAR, @Alex: Please also check if you have the latest drivers installed for your Nvidia GPU. Sometimes Step 3. DSM and Orthomosaic takes too long on machines with Quadro GPUs as mentioned here: https://support.pix4d.com/hc/en-us/articles/218195063

@Lyle: Could you explain us in more detail at which step did you encounter slower processing time? Do you face the same issue also with the latest version of the software?

@All: for a very large project (more than 5000 images), a very high amount of RAM is preferable. We would suggest to increase the RAM to 128GB. If you are having trouble to process this dataset in a single project you could try the following:

When processing a very large dataset, it is best to process each steps individually and to check at each steps that the processing went well to avoid reprocessing previous steps if a problem is detected.

Best regards,