We’re pretty excited. Last week we announced that version 11.01 of Global Mapper supports LizardTech™ MrSID™ Generation 4 (MG4) among its many supported elevation formats. Mapmakers who use Global Mapper will now benefit from being able to load point clouds compressed using LizardTech Lidar Compressor™ into Global Mapper.

Earlier this week we were able to announce that Merrick & Company has similarly integrated MG4 support into its MARS^® (Merrick Advanced Remote Sensing) software application. Users of MARS 6.0, available now, can load MG4 files into MARS for visualizing and managing LiDAR terrain datasets.

How are they doing this? They’re using LizardTech’s MrSID Generation 4 Decode SDK, a free download.

Oh, and we should remind any ArcGIS 3D Analyst users that MG4 files are supported via LizardTech’s free MrSID Plug-in for ArcGIS 3D Analyst (http://www.lizardtech.com/download/dl_options.php?page=plugins), so you can work with MG4 files the same way you work with LAS files to create contours and surfaces.

The way we feel about all this is: The more the merrier.