Pyramids versus Overviews

[NathanHeick]

I am trying to understand the performance differences between building overviews and building pyramids.  I have 600 MB tiled orthophotos and I want to know if I should skip building the pyramids and use overviews entirely.  Otherwise, I am guessing I would need a few levels worth of overviews on top of the pyramids.  If I choose to apply some color-balancing and other image processing, would this make overviews even more beneficial.  The mosaic datasets only need to be setup one time.  The source data won't change.

Thanks,


Nathan

[JakeSkinner]

Hi Nathan,

In regards to building pyramids, take a look at the following link.

Build pyramids�??Pyramids help to improve the display speed of imagery.  They can also impact the number of mosaic dataset overviews that are  generated. Generally, you should build pyramids for images with greater  than 3,000 columns. There is little to gain from building pyramids for a  collection of preprocessed and tiled imagery as overviews generally  provide a better solution for improving performance.

[NathanHeick]

What about the case where the source rasters are 12,000 by 18,000 and tiled by the vendor?  We might want to do some image processing using a referenced mosaic dataset, but we want the source mosaic dataset to remain untouched.  When do pyramids outperform overviews?

[JoeBryant2]

I'd like to re-iterate Nathan's question: What is meant by > than 3,000 "columns"?

Our orthophotography mosaic dataset references 79 different TIFFs; each TIFF is on average around 8k x 8k pixels. Do you mean greater than 3,000 pixels per image?

I'm trying to determine if I should check "Force Overview Tiles (optional)" when using the Define Overviews tool, so that overviews are used instead of pyramids, since the overviews are supposed to be more efficient.

[deleted-user-yIALGElyA_K9]

Hey, Joe? What did you end up finding to be the best practice? I have a similar scenario to yours and am trying to decide between pyramids and overviews.

Thanks!

Jacob

Indiana DNR Water