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IQ180 shooting tethered - speed?

gerald.d

Well-known member
Hi all -

Simple question. Apologies if it's been answered a dozen times already :)

What's the fastest speed that I can shoot with an IQ180 tethered, with the shots being saved directly to the computer's hard drive?

What I'm looking to achieve is this:
1. Camera is remotely triggered (NOT via Capture One, but by another means)
2. Image is saved directly to the computer's hard drive through the tether
3. Image is converted to a TIFF and saved

Repeat above several hundred times. Ideally, firing off a shot every 2 seconds, and with no buffering in the chain.

Possible?

Thanks,

Gerald.
 

dougpeterson

Workshop Member
Hi all -

Simple question. Apologies if it's been answered a dozen times already :)

What's the fastest speed that I can shoot with an IQ180 tethered, with the shots being saved directly to the computer's hard drive?

What I'm looking to achieve is this:
1. Camera is remotely triggered (NOT via Capture One, but by another means)
2. Image is saved directly to the computer's hard drive through the tether
3. Image is converted to a TIFF and saved

Repeat above several hundred times. Ideally, firing off a shot every 2 seconds, and with no buffering in the chain.

Possible?

Thanks,

Gerald.
In short: absolutely. In fact you can go a tad faster than that.

In long: to do that indefinitely will require a very high spec machine, some custom scripting, and a good bit of consultation on settings/workflow/options. In all likelihood it will also require purchase (separate from the hardware) of the software SDK which allows deep customization of the capture/process workflow.

In some cases it will be a better idea to set up an automatic workflow with two systems whereby one handle capture and the other handles processing. In some cases it will work better to do a queue-to-process with excess downtime used to complete the queue (e.g. overnight or lunchtime). It depends on the specifics of what you're doing.

It just so happens that Digital Transitions is rather an authority in this area as we have a dedicated Department of Cultural Heritage which deals with museums, galleries, and other entities many of whom are digitizing thousands of pages per day - some in automatic rigs that, like your use-case, require constant operation at a given speed.

We also deal (though not as much) with aerial applications with similar requirements of extended captures at a consistent speed.

This stuff makes me happy. I am a nerd at heart.
 

gerald.d

Well-known member
Thanks Doug.

SDK and deep customisation of workflow simply to automate the creation of a TIFF? Sounds a bit OTT to me. This kind of thing surely shouldn't be rocket science?

This would need to be done in the field, with a single lap-top.

I'm exploring just how quickly I would be able to create a 25 gigapixel full spherical panorama. 2 seconds between shots would be about as fast as I'd want to go, as the robotic pano head would need to settle between each shot.

Regards,

Gerald.
 

dougpeterson

Workshop Member
Depends. Your original question did not include your specific application.

The specific application you're discussing requires little or no customization, requires nothing more than a half-decent laptop and can be done in the field (though be aware you're going to drain your laptop battery VERY quickly if you don't have AC power).

You originally stated you wanted "no buffering in the chain" which I thought you meant you wanted to maintain (for whatever reason) zero images in buffer. That requirement is tricky.

Probably instead you meant that you wanted the shot-to-shot time to be the same for every shot in the sequence which is not a challenge for several hundred shots. Any high-end laptop (e.g. recent MBP) with an SSD can do this. At the end of the sequence you may have several images in the camera buffer, but since the back has (IIRC) 2 gb of ram this will not impact the shot-to-shot speed.

I also read your question to mean you wanted the TIFF to be produced at the same time and at the same rate the raw files are captured. Producing 240mb TIFFs from 80mp raw files on the same computer at the same time said 80mp raw files are being captured - that requires a tremendously powerful setup (or preferably more than one computer working in tandem) and "deep customization" and probably the SDK.

If you don't need the final TIFF to be complete shortly after the final RAW file is captured then this again drops the requirements tremendously. Typically around 20-40 seconds is required on a laptop to process such a TIFF. So processing e.g. 200 files will take around an hour and a half. From these numbers you can see how difficult (though not impossible provided the appropriate budget) it is to accomplish what I thought you were asking: processing TIFFs at the same rate (0.5 fps) as you are capturing the raws.

The capture part of this (1 IQ180 frame per 2 seconds for several hundred shots onto a standard high-end laptop with consistent shot-to-shot time) is easy. The "zero buffer" and "simultaneous processing" that I thought you wanted was the tricky part.

I haven't played with MASSIVE stitching in a while, but I would assume that even with greatly improved algorithms (compared to my last experience) and multi-core processors and fast hard drives that the creation of a spherical pano from around 48 GB worth of input TIFFs will still be the majority of the total start-to-finish process. But I don't know that - like I said it's been a while since I've stitched more than 300 megapixels.
 
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