Stitching with MAC 10.3.9

[sanking]

Hi Sandy,

My card and drives are USB-2. USB-2 is about 40 times faster than USB-1. The regular usb ports on the G4 are USB-1, and I had the same experience using them that you did. The USB-2 card I bought (an IOgear) cost less than $20.

Okay, I understand now. I had not thought about the fact that the G4 ports are USB-1.
So even if drive is USB-2 the slow exchange is at the computer port. Thanks for taking the time to explain this.


Sandy

[Marko]

Sandy,

If you can network the two computers using OS9 and OS X, you can surely transfer files between them too. Once you have them networked, you can share a disk on your OS X machine and it will appear just as another disk in your OS 9 Finder.

Your wireless connection speed is around 10 Mbits per second ideally, but much less in practice. Your wired Ethernet should be at least 100 Mbits per second (not much variance here), so it should be visibly faster just for that reason, but there are also other factors that influence it.

Investing a little effort into properly configuring a simple Ethernet between your two computers should, IMHO, solve both of your problems.

Just my $0.02.

[D. Bryant]

Sandy,

If you can network the two computers using OS9 and OS X, you can surely transfer files between them too. Once you have them networked, you can share a disk on your OS X machine and it will appear just as another disk in your OS 9 Finder.

Your wireless connection speed is around 10 Mbits per second ideally, but much less in practice. Your wired Ethernet should be at least 100 Mbits per second (not much variance here), so it should be visibly faster just for that reason, but there are also other factors that influence it.

Investing a little effort into properly configuring a simple Ethernet between your two computers should, IMHO, solve both of your problems.

Just my $0.02.

Sandy,

What Marco said. You may wish to setup a Gigabit LAN for the two machines replacing the 100 MBit router with a gigabit router. Of course this requires gigabit ethernet cards on each box but this will be your fastest option. I would scan and save to the G4 then move the closed file to the G5. The big question I suppose in your case is "are there gigabit cards and drivers available for OS9?"

Just my 2 cents,

Don Bryant

[Richard Wall]

One other thing you might try, if you have a firewire port on both computers, is setting one computer to target disk mode. Doing this makes one computer act like a firewire hard drive. You can find out more information about doing this at:

http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage..._mode_ben.html

As for the stitching software I have been using VRWorx for a while now with good results. However, I have recently switched to PTGui because VRWorx does not yet work under Mac OS 10.5.2 and Photoshop CS3 does not always stitch accurately. I have been pretty impressed with the ease with which PTGui works. www.ptgui.com

Attached is a 360 image I stitched from 12 frames using PTGui. It is of the California coastline near Bowling Ball Beach. I used a gps unit to tag my location.
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=38.864683,+-123.654067

r.

[Henry Ambrose]

Ethernet will definitely work for you. I have a G4 running 10.3.9 with 10/100 ethernet wired into an Apple Airport Gigabit router. Also wired in is my Intel Mac (10.4.11) main workstation. I just copy the scans from my G4 scanning machine over to the Intel Mac. Works great and plenty fast. I've been doing this for many years but with various older hardware. It just keeps on getting better as the hardware speeds up.

[archivue]

i'm running my scanner on a G3 with OS9... i used to transfert my scan via ethernet, but now i've bought a fire wire harde drive that dosen't need alim (la cie rugged) and i plugged it to the G3 and write the scan file directly to it... then i plugged it to my mac pro... and work dirrectly on that file, otherwise i can even transfert it to the mac pro using fire wire 800.

[Marko]

You may wish to setup a Gigabit LAN for the two machines replacing the 100 MBit router with a gigabit router. Of course this requires gigabit ethernet cards on each box but this will be your fastest option. I would scan and save to the G4 then move the closed file to the G5. The big question I suppose in your case is "are there gigabit cards and drivers available for OS9?"

My early-2002 QuickSilver G4 had a Gigabit/100/10 card built in. Gigabit would require specialized cable and switch, though. I am not sure that would be a worthwhile investment for a 2-computer network, but if there is a faster option, I am not aware of it. Two computers, on the other hand, can easily be networked into a 100 T Ethernet directly, sans the switch, using only a cross-over UTP cable.

[Gordon Moat]

I have used ArcSoft Panorama Maker a few times on older Macs. Seems to work very well, though it really slows down on large files. This is very simple software, with few controls, though you can always edit a bit afterwards in PhotoShop.

The other way is the old fashioned way in PhotoShop, simply merging two images. It can take some work with the painting tools, but if you have the time, and a WACOM tablet, you can get great results.

Ciao!

Gordon Moat Photography

[D. Bryant]

Two computers, on the other hand, can easily be networked into a 100 T Ethernet directly, sans the switch, using only a cross-over UTP cable.

Good call Marko. I've done that and data rates are very high! That could be the fastest cheap easy option.

Don Bryant

[Paul H]

For stitching, autopano pro works really well.

I have had good success in the past with Hugin on Windows XP, but the Mac version is not as up to date and the Windows & Linux versions.

As for file transfer, 100MB ethernet should do you just fine, as you are more likely to run into performance bottlenecks on the old hard drive.