Efficient handling of super wide, but not so tall, bitmap?

Question

Is there any way to create a more space/resource efficient bitmap? Currently I try to render a file, approx 800px high but around 720000px wide. It crashes my application, presumably because of the share memory-size of the bitmap.

Can I do this more efficiently, like creating it as an gif directly and not later when I save it?

I try to save a series of lines/rectangles from a real world reading, and I want it to be 1px per 1/100th of a second.

Answer 1

You have to remember that any image you load into memory regardless if it's a GIF or JPEG or whatever on disk will be turned into a 32 bit bitmap which means four bytes per pixel.

This means that the image you're creating will be:

4 bytes * 800 pixels high * 720,000 pixels wide = 2,304,000,000 bytes

You're basically blowing your memory by trying to create an image that large.

For whatever you're trying to accomplish the answer is tiling and caching your image.

Answer 2

Your image is about 2.3 gig, and the biggest .Net object you can have is 2 gig regardless if the machine is 32 or 64 bit.

You're going to have to break the bitmap up in chunks to handle an image that size.