I can't thank you both enough for taking a look at this. I really, really appreciate your time.
I'm still finding that the Build Point Cloud step takes a very long time to generate even a small area of the point cloud. E.g., it'll take an hour to generate a point cloud when the bounding box is set to just a 5' x 5' area. I'm running multiple iterations to try to reconcile misalignments between the photogrammetry-generated point cloud and the laser scans. I'm now past my project deadline, so there's some time pressure. After finding an apparent bug in 2.2.0 that won't allow me to process new depth maps, I'm now resetting the alignment for the entire project in a last-ditched effort. I'll, of course, report the bug in the relevant thread.
Egor, please excuse my ignorance, but can you clarify what you mean by "check load?" The percentage of time the drive is processing read/write requests (as graphed in the task manager performance window) is very low. I've checked the read-write speeds of the processing drive and got Read = 5324 MB/s and Write = 5301 MB/s. There seems to be a significant disconnect between that read time and the "preloading data" time. E.g., in one example, it took ~559 seconds to load ~5121 MB of depth maps -- it seems like it should've taken less than a second. Am I missing something here?
For anyone who comes across this thread in the future, I checked read/write speeds by following this brief tutorial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjcGfnVdqz4Bzuco, I've abandoned the high-quality settings and am working with medium settings. I'm very familiar with the process of GSD and detectable feature size in relation to the photo resolution/sensor and capture distance. I'm not familiar with choosing my depth map quality settings to correlate to the desired detectable feature size, though. Do you know of a way to correlate the depth map settings to a desired point cloud "resolution"? Or perhaps a relevant resource that I've missed? Lastly, I'd love to understand where you say the total extracted points in the log file - I couldn't find your referenced value (1 059 126 305) anywhere in the log file, and I thought the log only gave you a total for points generated from a subset of depth maps.
Thanks for reading and any additional input.