Thorsten Froehlich wrote:

> First of all, you should really use Targa (or PNG) as format because for TIFF
> images POV-Ray right now will always allocate a transmit channel.  So with
> that alone, your big image requires one GB, not including whatever the TIFF or
> JPEG libraries may be allocating to decompress the image.

OK... I read things about PoV maybe going to remove TIFF support. Sounds
strangefor me, as TARGA is far less used than TIFF in the real world, but if the
TIFF library
is unreliable ... For PNG, I am still cautious, as I am not sure, for instance,
that every
browser understands all the features of this format, like transparency. But this
is
unrelated to the present problem, of course. I do use PNG as image maps in PoV,
sometimes.

> Further, if you are using such a high resolution, may I assume you are also
> trying to render an image with a size that will actually benefit from an input
> image of this size?  If so, you also have to add memory for the output image
> and so on and so on.

In my actual script, I switch several times between low, medium and high
resolution planetmaps. This is because I build a MPEG 1 movie, with a Mars flyby,
starting and ending
at, say, 8 Mars radiuses, with a slow, very low-altitude (a few tenths of km) fly
above Valles Marineris.
So I really use the high resolution, for some parts. The final movie format is
what I want, but to keep
it smoothly running on reasonnable UCs (like mine, just above 1GHz, with
middle-class
graphics card) I choose a conservative 640x480 pixels. It is already impressive
...
I use such animations for various level courses.
By the way, I would like to try MPEG 2, but have not found a really useable free
or not-too-expensive
codec.

> If you want to avoid the problem, your only solution is to get (access to) a
> 64 bit system, that is any current Compaq Alpha, IBM Power, Sun Sparc, SGI
> Mips or HP PA-RISC system and then recompile POV-Ray 3.1g for one of those (or
> compatible systems).  Of course you can also wait for a final release of
> POV-Ray 3.5 and compile its source code, but either way, a 32-bit processor is
> simply not up to the data size you want to handle :-(

My next system maybe a 64bit, but, right now, I have access to 32 bit ones
(Windows or Linux;
I stick to Windows, just from lazyness : it is so easy... And the rendering speed
should not be
significantly different, as it is only marginally OS-dependant, from tests I
made; in my case,
faster disks would be a great improvement).
By the way, with the ~11kx6k image, parsing time is round 1.5 minute, rendring
time 6 sec.

Ok, I think I know everything now  ;-)

Thanks a lot !

Gilles

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