We listened to your feedback, and made no fewer than twenty major improvements to the way that horizons are created, managed, and used in Insight 3.

Brace yourselves.

• True multi-survey horizonsYou can now pick a single horizon on any number of surveys, without any up-front configuration. The individual pieces remain separate and editable, even where they overlap in space.  If there’s any mistie, that mistie is preserved at this stage.Afterwards, it’s easy to combine everything into a single surface — specifying precedence where they overlap — and interpolate to fill the whole region.
• Infinite undo/redo for every horizon pick and operationEvery horizon action can be reversed, all the way back to the very first pick.  This history is saved in the horizon database, so it’s not limited to the current Insight session, or the person who did the original work.You can now unwind any mistake, no matter how long ago it was made.
• Save custom horizon propertiesStore any set of values as a custom property on any horizon, allowing you to recall it instantly, and drape it over the surface in 3D.  Where you’d previously export these amplitude maps — and not be able to drape them back over the surface — you can now store them right inside the horizon.  It’s perfect for amplitude-extractions over large areas that are expensive to calculate, horizon maths results, and so on.
• Multi-user sharingAlthough Insight has always allowed multiple users to view a horizon, the multi-user experience is now better in two important ways.First: the new database allows us to ensure that only person is editing simultaneously.  Previously you could both edit, but whomever saved last would win.Second: once saved, those edits are immediately visible to everyone else, without reloading the session — the changes just appear!  It’s much simpler to collaborate with your team, and be sure that you’re always seeing the most up-to-date work.
• Horizons autosave as you workA few of you have lost power or had Windows crash, only to realise that you hadn’t saved your work all day.  Although most of the session has always autosaved, the large size of horizons has prevented that until now.The new horizon format allows us to store changes the instant you make them, so you’ll never lose an afternoon’s work again.
• More efficient use of memoryBecause of the way that horizons were stored on disk, previous versions of Insight had to load the entire thing, even if you were only looking at a small part.Insight 3 loads only the portions of the horizon that are needed, on-demand.  Unless you’re viewing the entire horizon in the map view or as a surface in the 3D view, this will usually mean using much less memory.
• Horizons open instantlyThis also means that Insight can open horizons instantly during session loading.  You no longer have to wait for massive horizons to be fully loaded into memory at startup.
• Simple amplitude extraction between two horizonsThat five-step workflow is now one: just select your horizons and volume.  It couldn’t be simpler!
• Simple volumetrics between two horizonsThe Geometry tab’s volume calculation now allows top and/or bottom horizons, instead of being limited to a constant bottom, so you can do a two-horizon calculation in one step instead of two.
• Re-grid onto any surveyHorizon re-grid is no longer a one-way operation: where previously the result was always an X/Y surface, you can now grid horizons onto any survey, including 2D lines.
• Simple horizon maths functionsOperations such as merging horizons in Horizon Maths used to require an arcane formula to handle missing locations properly.  For example, to merge four horizons (a, b, c, and d, in that order of preference), you’d have written:if (!isnan(a), a, if (!isnan(b), b, if (!isnan(c), c, d)))Now you can simply write:

  merge(a, b, c, d)

  Or if you want to combine the horizons, keeping the shallowest of the four at any point:

  min(a, b, c, d)

  Similar functions exist for all the most common operations.  And when working with horizon pieces picked on multiple surveys, these functions preserve that relationship, resulting in a horizon that exists on the union of all the input surveys.

• New horizon properties: Dip angle, Dip direction, Strike directionThese three additional properties will instantly compute the dip angle, dip direction, or strike direction.  These can be viewed as value maps in 2D or 3D and used in Horizon Maths like any other properties.
• New amplitude-extraction property: Sum (including SNA / SPA)The function sums all of the samples within the window (which may be defined by two horizons, per #8 above).  You can also provide optional minimum/maximum amplitude cut-offs, for example to sum only negative or positive amplitudes.
• New amplitude-extraction property: ModeIf you’re working with integer-value volume data (for example, a lithology probability volume produced by DUG’s Quantitative Interpretation workflow), this property will calculate the most-common value within a window at each location.
• Manual horizon picking in the Gather ViewAlthough it’s always been possible to propagate a gather horizon, or to hand-pick that horizon on a common-offset section, you can now also do manual picking directly in the gather view.
• 2D gather horizonsGather horizons on 2D lines are now fully supported, exactly like on 3D data.
• Extract a single offset from a gather horizonIf you’ve picked a gather horizon, but now want to work with just a single offset as a regular 2D or 3D horizon, this is now a one-click operation instead of a tortured eight-step workflow.
• One-click copyWant to try a few different approaches, or modify a colleague’s data without affecting the original?  Duplicating a horizon is now a one-click operation.
• Fancy text-file importerYou said that our horizon-importing tools weren’t awesome enough, and we heard you!The new importer makes it easy to describe fixed- or variable-width columnar data, assign different meanings to the columns that you want to import, handle different Z units, and import directly onto any survey.  Buttons for saving and loading templates make it easy to deal with your most common formats even more quickly.
• Simpler manual-picking hotkeysSingle-key hotkeys for the most common horizon-picking toggles will help reduce the number of repetitive stress injuries in the world.

As you can see, and thanks in no small part to your feedback, we’ve refined nearly every part of the horizon experience!

Check back soon for another breathtaking adventure behind the Insight 3 curtain.