LiDAR contour clip

[KevinNelson]

I'm trying to find a way to clip a large lidar dataset (2ft contours for an entire county) down to the size of a town using a shapefile. The clip tool doesn't seem to be working for it. I'm using ArcMap 10, any suggestions?

[DanPatterson_Retired]

"doesn't seem to work" isn't providing enough information...are you getting errors? are the input files in the same projection?  more info needed

[JeffreySwain]

There are a plethora of unanswered questions here. Are you using a shapefile? Do the coordinate systems of the two datasets match?

As Dan mentioned, without more information it is difficult to make a suggestion.

[michaelcollins1]

The shape file will likely be too large, you'll probably need to export it to a file geodatabase

[LarryJahn]

I'm having the same issue.  I have approximately 425,000 contour lines (1 foot intervals).  Both the contours and clip polygon have the same projection.  I've also tried to clip them as shapefiles and feature classes (within file geodatabase) without success.  ArcMap runs and runs, but doesn't produce any clipped feature class or errors.  I'm using ArcMap 10, SP2, Windows 7, Dell Optiplex with 8 GB RAM.

[ChrisSnyder]

Contour FCs tend to have features with TONS of verticies. Personal experience: In buiding 10ft contours for all the bare earth LiDAR data available for WA State  (you can't do it with the out of the box tool BTW), I found some output contour features with over 7,000,000 verticies. That's a lot of verticies! What happens is that the clip tool needs to load these features into the RAM in order to find the XY intersection with the clip layer. Basically, these extreemly large features overwhelm the clip algorithm's ability (remeber 32-bit RAM limitation is < 2.1 GB, actually about 1.7 for ArcMap) to do the calculation.

Now in v10 (ArcInfo only maybe?), there is a handy tool called "Dice" that should solve your issue - check it out.