CombineZP Crashing

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Deanimator
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CombineZP Crashing

Post by Deanimator »

While I generally like CombineZP, I have a lot of issues with it crashing.
  1. It crashes on any number of full size jpegs exported from raw files from my Canon T4i using Photoshop Elements 15. I have to shrink the images by 50%.
    It crashed a couple nights ago when doing 168 images, until I shrank them by 75% and reduced them to 150dpi.
I'm running Windows 10 Pro 64bit with 8gb of RAM.

Is there some setting I need to change?

I like CombineZP, and in any case can't afford Helicon or Zerene at this time.

Chris S.
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Re: CombineZP Crashing

Post by Chris S. »

Deanimator,

From what you've described, I see a strong chance that you'll get crashes whenever you work your computer really hard. If that's the case, you're only seeing it with CombineZP because this program taxes your computer more than other programs.

So the starting point is to drive your computer very hard with testing software, and see if it glitches. To do this, download a free copy of Prime95 software, and use it to run a "torture test" on your machine. If you can run Prime95 for 24 hours without a glitch (a condition known as "Prime95 stable"), then suspect CombineZP; otherwise, it's your computer.

Could you try this and report back?

--Chris S.

rjlittlefield
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Post by rjlittlefield »

On my system, CombineZP installs in C:\Program Files (x86). That means it is only a 32-bit executable. My guess is that you're running into a fundamental problem of address space limit. I'm not aware of any controls that will affect that.

How large are the images that you're trying to process, and which method are you trying to process them with?

--Rik

Chris S.
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Post by Chris S. »

Deanimator,

Rik's point has merit. If you are getting crashes before your machine has time to heat up, I suggest you give priority to his line of thinking. OTOH, if the crashes come sporadically and only after CombineZP has been going a while, try the torture test.

--Chris S.

Deanimator
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Post by Deanimator »

The ONLY software I'm having problems with is CombineZP.

I tried to stack 169 tifs, approximately 51mb a piece. That crashed.

I shrank them to 50%. That crashed.

I shrank them by 75% and reduced them to 150dp. That "worked" albeit with awful results.

Deanimator
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Post by Deanimator »

Chris S. wrote:Deanimator,

Rik's point has merit. If you are getting crashes before your machine has time to heat up, I suggest you give priority to his line of thinking.
My PC stays on all the time. The only problems are with CombineZP.

Pau
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Post by Pau »

I was using Combine ZP until I upgraded form WinXP 32 to a new computer with Win7 64. Then the crashes were continuous, in fact preventing to do real stacks, no idea about the cause but I don't think it could be due to the lack of resources, I suspect it's related to running it under a 64bits system. Being too ignorant on software, I just switched to Zerene.
Pau

zzffnn
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Post by zzffnn »

I just have a data point for CombineZP. Basically, on my core i3 Win 8 machine, it worked just fine stacking 150 frames of BMP (2047*1151 8.98 MB). Jpg also worked just fine. No crush.

Could it be your 51MB tifs are too much for the program/hardware combo? I just guessing - Rik or Chris S made good points.
Selling my Canon FD 200mm F/2.8 lens

Deanimator
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Post by Deanimator »

zzffnn wrote:Could it be your 51MB tifs are too much for the program/hardware combo? I just guessing - Rik or Chris S made good points.
I doubt that it's a problem with the hardware, since I don't have problems with other applications, including other photographic software.

I do indeed believe that the number and size of the images being stacked, exceed some unstated limit in CombineZP. Unfortunately, I haven't so far found any hard data on what CombineZP's actual limits are.

Last night I started working with a German program called Picolay. I haven't gotten a good stack out of it yet, but it hasn't crashed either, making it completely through the tifs that killed CombineZP.

Deanimator
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Post by Deanimator »

Pau wrote:Being too ignorant on software, I just switched to Zerene.
If my latest contract IT job weren't coming to an end next month, that (or Helicon) would probably be the route I'd take. I've spent too much money on photographic stuff lately as it is.

I've got an interview tomorrow. If I'm still working by the end of April, I'll probably buy Zerene.

Chris S.
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Post by Chris S. »

Deanimator wrote:
Chris S. wrote:Deanimator,

Rik's point has merit. If you are getting crashes before your machine has time to heat up, I suggest you give priority to his line of thinking.
My PC stays on all the time. The only problems are with CombineZP.
For clarity, when I wrote "heat up," I meant "gets really hot from continued, maxed-out processing." When computers are turned on but idle, they don't generate much heat. Also, it's easily possible that no other software you run pushes your machine enough to get it very hot, either.
While I generally like CombineZP, I have a lot of issues with it crashing.
Not sure what you mean by "crash." If you mean that CombineZP freezes or quits, your issue is probably with CombineZP. But if you mean that the machine suddenly shuts down or reboots, this is almost always a heat problem. If the latter, I strongly recommend a torture test, which is very easy to perform, and neatly isolates such problems into either hardware or software domains.

--Chris S.

Grahame
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Post by Grahame »

As a thought.
Right click on the shortcut or the app etc and use "troubleshoot compatibility" then troubleshoot program / The program worked in earlier versions etc / give it a run as Windows 7.
It may be that it doesn't play well with W10.
Helicon and Zerene have trials give one of them a spin, if your machine doesn't crash probably not your hardware.

Chris S.
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Post by Chris S. »

Grahame wrote:Helicon and Zerene have trials give one of them a spin, if your machine doesn't crash probably not your hardware.
Giving these stacking applications a trial is a fine idea, if the intent is to find a stacking application that best matches one's subjects, workflow, visual standards, and budget. But using these applications to test hardware stability is wildly inefficient. Prime95 is free, takes less than five minutes to setup and initiate a stress-test under, and is a well-understood standard for computer stress-testing among thousands of system administrators world-wide. It produces a lot of heat--quickly--and while the system is subject to this heat, instructs the CPU to perform fault-intolerant calculations. It keeps a record of any computational errors produced. This record is highly predictive for errors produced by computers under heavy load--many of which can produce crashes. This record is often more useful than attempting to induce crash events, which tend to occur far less often than calculation errors; this said, crashes are still useful data points, and in my experience, nothing precipitates them faster than Prime95, if hardware is at fault.

Granted, we could conceivably press focus-stacking software into service for computer stress-testing. But doing so--especially across multiple stacking applications--creates a vast array of things to be learned. Meanwhile, well-understood protocols already exist for computer stress testing, one of which is Prime95's stress test. Why re-invent the wheel?

--Chris S.

Chris S.
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Post by Chris S. »

I may be able to test some of Deanimator's issues, but would first like help from our community.

I have a recently-built a Windows 10 PC. I also have numerous stacks of images acquired both larger in pixel dimensions per image, and deeper in number of images, than the images used in Deanimator's tests. So I should be able to test deep stacks of large images in CombineZP on a Windows 10 machine. Done properly, this should help clarify any limits inherent to CombineZP.

But I have a problem: Can anyone help me obtain a clean installer for CombineZP? CombineZP author Alan Hadley's site is not responding, and the alternate sites from which I've tried to download CombineZP seem intent on wrapping Hadley's CombineZP in layers of parasitic junk software. Ugh!

Can anyone help?

--Chris S.

Pau
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Post by Pau »

I can't find the installer but I have the software already installed, I could send you the files next Monday if you find it useful, right now I'm going to a short trip.
Pau

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