You are exactly rigth. I will be looking into ISIS 3 once I have time for it in the following days. Fortunately computing ressources aren't a limitation here.
I keep you posted.

Wilfried

installing ISIS3on RHEL 6.3
( or the FREE rebuilds -- CentOS 6.3 , ScientificLinux6.3 )
is a bit over kill for ONE image

After 5 years i am still learning the ins and outs of isis

steps for using isis3
1)
learn the Linux Computer Operating System
-- a few Months Minimum
2)
Install ISIS3
And install the 30+ Gigs of base files


for ONLY that big Earth Topo data
use gdal ( runs on windows)
convert it to a tiff
use Nip2( works on WINDOWS7 )

and cut it up into usable files
( add 1000 to the pix values( math function) and save the tiff as a NORMAL unsigned 16 bit tiff
( a image that PhotoShop ON WINDOWS can use )

nip2 has built in functions for cropping and tiling


however with isis AFTER you add the lat/ long data ( manually BY HAND)
you can crop off an area defined by lat./long.
say
45N to 10N by 180W to 270W

_________________
"I don't pitch Linux to my friends, I let Microsoft do that for me."
Using OpenSUSE 42.1 & Scientific Linux 6.7

John,

it always depends on what people know...

I work on Linux and Windows in parallel, depending on what happens to be better suited for the actual task. You do, too (sometimes), right? When developing code, I HAVE to use both OSs (to check my code). I don't own a MAC though.

People being in commercial computing (like Wilfried) might also be "multi lingual", who knows I know that Wilfried and colleagues are using also OS-X besides Win 7, and ISIS 3 has some (limited?) support of OS-X.

My experiences with GDAL were quite bad in case of JPG2 'monster' file conversions. Under Linux it worked OK( but VERY slowly), but under Win 7/64bit it crashed regularly after some time. Same for a number of other users. As concerns myself, I am not using software giving me such experiences.

You probably use GDAL mostly under LINUX!? Did you recently try it under Win 7?? I think there is a bug in the GDAL memory management for 'monster' file challenges in Win 7.

Fridger

PS: Since a few recent subversions the ISIS 3 installation is MUCH faster than it used to be. And it's completely automatic. You can go for a quick Thai dinner or a Sushi in the meantime

the isis3 dev team was able to move to new servers and also open port 80 in rsync

add to that , the kernels are no longer REQUIRED to download ( except for the BASE install )
the footprint is a bit smaller .

_________________
"I don't pitch Linux to my friends, I let Microsoft do that for me."
Using OpenSUSE 42.1 & Scientific Linux 6.7

Instead of learning unknown command line tools from scratch (thats what you have to do without a specific step by step guide) I found this set of data today http://srtm.csi.cgiar.org/ and downloaded a SRTM_W_250m.tif which I expected to be a GEO Tiff and therfore already closer to what I actually want but my tool for GEO Tiffs 3DEM by Visualization Software wont load it.... So no real progress to report.