Guide To Post Stack Inversion: Geoview
Guide To Post Stack Inversion: Geoview
Introduction
Geoview is the program from Hampson-Russell which you can use to perform post-stack or pre-
stack inversion of seismic data. For inversion, you will need:
The output data, for the post-stack case, is a volume of derived acoustic impedance. For the pre-
stack case, the output volumes are acoustic impedance, shear impedance and density.
This tutorial takes you through the process of inverting a post stack data set, which consists of a 3D
seismic volume and 13 wells.
The typical workflow for post-stack inversion consists of the following steps:
In this tutorial, we will go through each of these steps for the post-stack case.
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Starting Geoview
Geoview is the name of the Hampson-Russell program which contains all available options,
including post stack inversion.
To start this tutorial, first start the Geoview program. On a Unix/Linux workstation, do this by
going to a command window and typing:
geoview
On a PC, start Geoview by clicking the Start button and selecting the Geoview option on the
Programs > HRS applications menu, or by clicking the Geoview icon on your desktop if one has
been set up.
When you launch Geoview , the first window that you see contains a list of any projects
previously opened in Geoview . For example, the figure below shows a single previous project,
which you can open. Your list will be blank if this is the first time you have ever run Geoview .
For this tutorial, we will start a new project. Before doing that, you can set all the data paths to
point to the location where you have stored the tutorial data. To do that, click the Settings and
Path tabs:
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Now you can see a series of default locations for the Data Directory, Project Directory, and
Database Directory. We would like to change all of these to point to the directory where the
tutorial data is stored.
To change all of the directories to the same location, click on the option Set all default
directories and then click the button to the right:
Then, in the File Selection Dialog, select the folder which contains the tutorial data:
After setting all three paths, the Geoview window will now show the selected directories (note
that yours may be different from what we show below):
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When you have finished setting all the paths, click Apply to store these paths:
Now click the Projects tab and choose the option to create a New Project:
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A dialog appears where we set the project name. We will call it Post stack inversion guide, as
shown below. Enter the project name and click OK on that dialog:
Now a dialog appears, asking you the name of the database to use for this project:
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The database is used to store all the wells used in this project. By default, Geoview creates a
new database, with the same name as the project and located in the same directory. For example,
this project is called Post stack inversion guide.prj, so the default database would be called Post
stack inversion guide.wdb. That would be desirable if we were starting a new project, intending
to read in well logs from external files.
For this tutorial, to save time, we have already created a database, which has the 13 wells already
loaded. To use that database, click Specify database. You will see a pop-up menu appear
below this button. Choose Open:
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The previous dialog shows the selected database and the new project name. Click OK to accept
this:
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One part of the Geoview window (called the Project Manager) shows all the project data so far.
The tabs along the left side select the type of project data. Right now, the Well tab is selected
and we can see the 13 wells from the external data base. Click the “►” sign near one of the
wells (01-17 is shown as an example), to see a list of curves in that well:
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To see more details about the wells, click the Data Explorer tab to the right:
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Click the arrow next to any of the wells (for example, well 01-17) to get more information about
the curves in that well:
Click the Single Well Display tab on the bottom menu and select the Map tab. We can now see
a base map, showing the location of the wells:
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Below the base map are a series of buttons. Click the Single Well Display button:
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Finally, to see the most complete view of the log curves within a well, go to the icon for that well
within the Project Data window and double-click.
This creates a new tab within the main Geoview window, called the Wells tab, which displays
the selected well curves:
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We have now loaded the wells which will be used in the post stack inversion process. The next
step is to load the seismic volume.
On the far left side of the Geoview window, click the Seismic tab:
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The window to the right of this tab shows all seismic data loaded so far. This is empty. Go to the
bottom of the window (on the left of the workspace) and click the Import Seismic button:
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Set the Geometry Type to 3D (this is the default) and click Next:
On the third page, we are telling the program what information it can use from the trace headers.
In fact, in this data set, there are Inline and Xline numbers, but not X and Y coordinates. That is
why we answer No to the question “Do you have X & Y coordinates in the trace headers?”:
After modifying that item, as shown, click Next to see the SEG-Y Format page:
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By default, this page assumes that the seismic data is a SEG-Y file with all header values filled in
as per the standard SEG-Y convention. For example, it expects to find the Inline and Xline
numbers at the byte locations shown above. If you are not sure that is true, click Header Editor
to see what is in the trace headers.
In our case, we believe the format information is correct, so click Next to move to the next page.
Now the following warning message appears because the program is about to scan the entire
SEG-Y file:
Click Yes to begin the scanning process. When the scanning has finished, the Geometry Grid
page appears:
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Because we have read the Inline and Xline numbers from the SEG-Y headers, the geometry is
correct. Click OK.
After building the geometry files, a new window appears, showing how each of the wells is
mapped into this seismic volume:
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In this case, all the wells are mapped to the correct Inline / Xline locations because the X and Y
locations have been properly set within the Geoview database. If this had not been done
previously, you would type in correct values for the Inline and Xline numbers.
Click OK to accept the locations shown on this window and the window is closed.
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The Geoview window currently shows Inline 1. We will now look at other parts of the data. The
first thing to see is the Base Map. To do that, select View>Base Map:
The base map appears, showing that the seismic volume is a rectangular grid with 119 inlines
and 81 cross lines. You can also see the 13 wells located within the volume:
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After looking at the base map, close that window by clicking on the button “x” on the upper right
corner of the map.
Now let’s look at a different inline. Type the number 27 in the numerical field at the top of the
seismic display and press the Enter key:
Inline 27 now appears. At the same time, we can see one of the sonic logs. Scroll down to see
this view:
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To see one of the cross lines, click the field which currently says Inline. Select the Xline option.
Cross line 1 now appears. To see the display positioned at one of the well locations, go to the
Well icon and click the down arrow as show below:
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The drop-down menu shows a list of wells in the project. Select one – say, 08-08, as shown – and
the Geoview window shows the crossline which intersects that well location:
In fact, note that three wells: 01-08, 08-08 and 09-08, appear on this line, so this is a good choice
of line to display.
We can also modify other plotting parameters by using the Seismic View Parameters window.
To bring up that window, click the “eyeball” icon as shown:
The Seismic View Parameters window contains a series of pages which control various aspects
of the plotting.
To see the parameters for a specific item, select that item from the list at the left side.
For example, here we have selected the Inserted Wells/Curve Selection item:
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Let us temporarily insert the density log by selecting that item as shown:
Now click Apply on the Seismic View Parameters window. The display is modified
accordingly:
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We will continue the tutorial with the sonic logs reinserted. To do this, click Reset Page and
OK on the View Parameters window. This redraws the Geoview window as before.
Importing Horizons
The last data component required for building the initial inversion model is a set of horizon
picks. You can use Geoview to pick the data directly. Alternatively, you can import horizons
which have been previously picked in other software. Geoview can read in picks in Landmark,
GeoQuest, or General ASCII format.
To start that process, select Horizon > Import Horizons > From File:
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From the File Selection Window, highlight the file called blackfoot_horizons.txt and click
Select:
Note that, at the lower left corner of the dialog, we are specifying this to be a Free Format file.
Click Next:
The next page of the dialog allows you to specify how the file is organized:
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The file display shows that there are 2 horizons in the file, and that we need to skip the first 4
information lines.
Fill in the format dialog as shown below, including the new Horizon Names (Note that you must
double-click in the entry fields to allow editing):
When you have modified the dialog as shown above, click OK. The imported horizons will be
displayed on the seismic window:
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Now that we have read in all the data necessary for the inversion, we are ready to start the
process.
First, look at the horizontal tabs to the left of the seismic window. You will see that one of those
tabs is called Processes. Click that tab to see a list of all the operations which are available in
Geoview. Each of the processes can be expanded. For example, if you click on both the
Seismic Processing and Inversion options, the following expanded list is seen:
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As we can see, the list includes Log Processing options, Seismic Processing options, AVO
Modeling and Analysis tools, Inversion options, etc. One way to do the inversion would be to
apply each of the desired options in turn. This would be the standard approach.
We will use an alternate procedure in this tutorial. We will use the pre-defined Workflows. Click
the Workflows tab. The window changes like this:
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Each of the items on this window contains a complete workflow for the specified process. Click
the item called Post Stack Inversion. The window changes like this:
We now see the suggested series of steps to be followed for Post Stack Inversion. The steps are
colored red to indicate that the parameters have not yet been supplied. These are the “default”
steps, but the list can be edited and customized, as we will see later.
Double-click the first item, Select Post-stack Seismic. An arrow will appear in front of the
item, as shown here:
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Now a dialog appears on the right with a list of all seismic volumes in the project:
Since we have only loaded one seismic volume, that volume is selected. Note that at the lower
right corner of the dialog, there is a button, Import Seismic, for importing more seismic
volumes:
In fact, we want to use the selected seismic volume, which is highlighted, so click Select on this
dialog:
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The dialog on the right shows the two horizons we have just loaded:
We use the horizons to interpolate between the wells when building the initial model for
inversion. For this reason, we do not always want to use all the horizons that are available. For
example, we may want to exclude horizons that are incomplete or noisy. For this tutorial, we will
use both of the imported horizons, which are already selected.
The next step is to apply the process Extract Statistical Wavelet by clicking that option.
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There are two basic methods for extracting the wavelet. One method uses the wells, and can give
a good estimate of both amplitude and phase spectra of the wavelet. However, that method
cannot be used until the well is correlated, i.e., until the proper depth-time relationship has been
determined.
The second method, called “statistical”, uses the seismic data alone to extract the wavelet. This
method will estimate the amplitude spectrum from the seismic data, but we must make an
assumption about the phase: typically we assume the data are zero-phase. In this step, we are
extracting a statistical wavelet. We will refine the wavelet extraction using the wells at a later
stage.
By default, the program will examine the entire data volume, but this is rarely appropriate. In
particular, we want to set a time window around the zone of interest. Change the dialog to extract
using the limited time window shown on the single cross line now displayed on the screen:
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When you have changed the dialog as shown above, click Run to extract the wavelet.
Note that the time domain response is in the upper window, while the amplitude and phase
spectra are in the lower. Note also this small button at the lower right of the wavelet window:
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If you click that button, the wavelet window will be “docked” within its own Wavelets tab:
This is a handy way to keep track of any window created within our software. To release the
wavelet window from its tab, click on the “airplane” at the lower right of the wavelet window:
All the windows created within our software can be docked or floating in this way. Finally, send
the wavelet window back to the wavelets tab by clicking the Wavelets button once again:
The next step is to select the wells to use in the model building:
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Once again, we see a list of the wells which have already been loaded into the project:
The buttons at the bottom of the dialog allow us to import more wells, if necessary. Also, note
that individual wells can be chosen by clicking the box to the left of the well name. In this case,
we want to use all the desired wells, which are selected by default. So click Select to complete
this step.
Now a new tab appears, showing one of the wells in the project:
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You can adjust the well plotting parameters by clicking the “eyeball” icon to bring up a dialog
for that purpose:
You can also apply various log processing options, like Log Editing, by going back to the
Processes list:
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For this tutorial, we will assume that the logs have been properly edited. Return to the Post
Stack Inversion Workflow.
The next step in the workflow is to Correlate the Wells, so double-click that item, as shown
below:
The process of Log Correlation examines the current depth-time conversion and optimizes it so
that the derived synthetic optimally matches the seismic. This is necessary because the depth-
time curve derived from the input sonic log is rarely sufficient for that purpose. Of course, if
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check shot data are available, that should be applied first. But experience has shown that fine-
tuning of the correlation between the synthetic and seismic is still required.
In practice, each of the wells used to build the inversion model needs to be correlated. For this
tutorial, we will correlate just one of the available wells, and assume that all the others have been
correlated previously. On the Well Selection Dialog, select the well 08-08 and click OK at the
bottom of the dialog:
Now a dialog appears to specify which seismic volume will be used for the correlation process,
and how the composite trace will be extracted from that volume:
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We create the composite trace by averaging the traces around the borehole location we are using
for the seismic correlation. For a vertical well, such as this one, that means averaging a selected
set of neighboring traces around the borehole. By default this is plus or minus 1 inline or
crossline:
For deviated wells, the process is more complex and involves averaging traces which are a
specified distance from the deviation path. For this tutorial, we will accept the defaults.
Note that on the dialog there is a Change wavelets button for changing the wavelet.
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The blue traces on this display are synthetic traces calculated from the sonic and density logs in
this well, using the depth-time curve currently stored in the database and the wavelet we have
previously extracted:
The red traces are the average or “composite” traces extracted from the seismic data. Actually all
the red traces are identical, since there is only a single composite trace.
The plot at the upper right shows the cross correlation between the synthetic trace and the
composite trace:
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That correlation result depends on the analysis window, which can be improved. The cross
correlation window defaults to be the largest possible window containing both the synthetic and
real trace. This can usually be improved by narrowing the analysis to the region when the log tie
is best:
Set the start time to 800, as shown above and click on Apply. The correlation plot now shows a
maximum correlation of 71.8 %.
It also suggests that the synthetic should be shifted down by 6 ms. That information is also
displayed on the menu bar at the base of the window:
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The asymmetric shape of the Cross Correlation plot suggests that there is a residual phase error
in the synthetic, which could be improved by extracting a new wavelet now using the wells. To
do this, click the Wavelet button and choose the option Extract Wavelet using Wells:
On the dialog, note that the default option is the Constant Phase Option, which we will use.
Also, we select the Time Window to range from 800 to 1200 ms.
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Click the Wavelets button to move this new plot to the Wavelets tab.
The Correlation Plot now shows a maximum correlation of 72%, with a more symmetrical
shape.
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From this we can conclude that we have a good estimate of the wavelet phase and a good
correlation for this well now. Click OK to accept this correlation.
A dialog pops up suggesting a name for the new sonic log we have created by the log correlation
process. Even though this process, by default, has only changed the depth-time curve and not the
actual sonic log, Geoview calculates a new sonic log (identical to the previous) as a place holder
for identifying the new depth-time curve. Click OK to accept that new name:
We have now correlated one single well in this project. In practice, we would need to correlate
each of the wells individually before extracting the single average wavelet. The complete flow
looks like this:
For this tutorial, we will assume that all the other wells have already been correlated.
We are now ready to perform the next step on the workflow, which is Build Initial Model.
Double-click that item on the workflow list:
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The dialog which appears contains the default parameters for building the standard post-stack
inversion model. By default, all the wells are selected:
After interpolating the well log curves, a low-pass frequency filter will be applied, which, by
default, passes all frequencies up to 10 Hz, filters all frequencies above 15 Hz, and interpolates
the filter between those limits.
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There are many additional “Advanced” parameters, which you can examine by clicking the
Show Advanced Options button:
The Geoview window now shows the calculated initial model within the Models tab:
The wiggle traces on this display are the original seismic data, while the color displays the
filtered acoustic impedance. You can display any location on the model volume by using the
selection tools on the menu bar:
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The next step is to perform Inversion Analysis. This is the process of running inversion at the
well locations to QC and optimize the inversion parameters. At the same time, scalars are
automatically determined to scale the input seismic data to the amplitude range of the synthetic
seismic data. On the workflow, double-click Inversion Analysis:
The dialog which appears contains default selections of the main parameters. These are usually
appropriate.
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In this case, we are using the seismic data called blackfoot_seismic and we are inverting the
entire time window:
We are using the initial model previously generated, as shown in the following menu:
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We are using all the wells in the inversion analysis. Note that you can use different wells than the
wells used to build the initial model:
The Inversion Analysis window now appears, showing the inversion result at the first well
location:
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From left to right, the display shows the inversion result (in red) overlaying the original
impedance log from the well. To the right of that, we see the selected wavelet (in blue) and the
synthetic traces calculated from this inversion result (in red) followed by the original seismic
composite trace (in black). Finally, we see the error trace, which is the difference between the
two previous results. As hoped, the error is practically zero, indicating that the inversion is
mathematically correct, i.e., this inversion creates a synthetic trace which matches the real trace.
We are seeing the result at the first well location (01-08), but the controls on the upper menu bar
allow us to see any other well:
To the upper right of the display are a series of buttons, which allow us to fine-tune the
inversion. For example, the Wavelet button allows you to manipulate the inversion wavelet.
This has a wavelet “cartoon” on it. If you hold the mouse pointer over this button, the word
“Wavelet” will appear.
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A button below Wavelet allows us to view and change the initial model parameters:
For example, change the Inversion Method to Linear Programming Sparse Spike and click
Apply at the bottom of the dialog.
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Set the Inversion Method back to Model Based and click Apply to restore the default settings:
We can do more experiment with the other inversion parameters. Then close the Inversion
Parameters dialog by clicking the Close button:
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Now that we have optimized the parameters at the well locations, the last step is to apply the
inversion to the entire 3-D volume. Double-click the last item on the workflow, as shown below:
The dialog which appears shows all the inversion parameters which we have already set during the
inversion analysis phase. The only significant parameters to set here involve the data range and
time range of the input volume to be inverted:
In this case, we will invert the entire volume, so click Run at the base of the dialog to start that
process. This will take several seconds or minutes, depending on the speed of your computer.
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When the inversion process is done, the result is displayed in a split-screen along with the initial
model:
The default split-screen display is very useful for looking at the results, but there are many
improvements possible.
For example, you can increase the available plot space by clicking on the “x” on the Project
Manager window, as shown, to temporarily hide that window:
To restore the Project Manager window, click its name to the left:
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You can also temporarily hide one of the views. For example, click on the first icon shown below
to temporarily hide View 1, which shows the model:
There are actually 3 views available. Click on the third icon to display View 3:
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To load some data into View 3, first go to the Project Data window on the left and find the input
seismic data:
Then, holding the left mouse button down, drag-and-drop the volume blackfoot_seismic into the
blank View 3, as seen below:
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Now turn off Views 1 and 3 by clicking the first and third buttons:
We can zoom in by clicking the button in the top toolbar, as shown below:
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Now, right-click within the inversion window. A series of display options appear for this window.
For example, we can easily modify the Color Scheme.
The Color Scale numerical range can be changed graphically by selecting Color Key > Color
Key and Histogram:
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Or, the range can be set manually by selecting Color Key > Modify Range:
On the dialog which appears, set the desired range from 8000 to 12000 and click OK:
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For the most complete control of the inversion display, right-click within the inversion window and
select Seismic View Parameters as shown below:
On the menu, we can see that both the Inserted Curve log and color log are Match Color Data, as
shown below. Because the color data is the inverted impedance on the seismic window, the match
color data is the Computed Impedance P of the well here.
On the dialog, change the Inserted Curve types to display the Computed Impedance P as a Color
Log, as shown below. Click OK:
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The display now shows the impedance logs from the wells inserted within the inversion volume:
Using View3D
We have now finished the Post Stack Inversion workflow. We have created a volume of acoustic
impedance and displayed it using the standard seismic viewing tools. We will now finish this
tutorial by looking at the derived volume in the View3D visualization tool, which is provided with
Geoview.
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Right-click on the inversion display. On the pop-up menu, select the option to Send View to
View3D:
A message appears to confirm the data range we wish to display. Click Ok to accept the default,
which is the entire volume:
Now the tab View3D shows the derived impedance volume as a 3D display:
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There are many options within the View3D window for optimizing the display. In this tutorial,
we will change a few of them.
For example, right click the window and select the option to Define the Zone of interest:
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Set the desired time range from 1000 to 1150 ms as shown and click OK:
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The view currently shows the same Cross Line which was visible on the original seismic
display. To turn on the Inline and Time sections, select those options at the bottom of the
window:
Note that each of the surfaces can be manipulated by selecting it using the mouse and the left
mouse button:
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We have now finished the Post Stack Inversion project. Close down the entire Geoview
program by selecting File>Exit on the Geoview window:
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