wwp@yahoogroups.com:
Re: Rules - What do we want to achieve from the WWP site?
Gabi Haindl 2006-Jan-06 21:26:00
Hi all,
help, comming home and got flooded by mail about rules and such ...
Okay, trying to answer/comment them in order how they appeared.
This one was from Yuval Levy:
(Re: Late Editing - Best of 2005)
>http://geoimages.berkeley.edu/wwp1205/html/GabiHaindl.html
>
>Breaks the size barrier at
>http://geoimages.berkeley.edu/wwp/practical/Sizes.html
>and I think it is good so! Can't fit such a detailed
>3D object in the size limits that ten years from now
>will look as ridicoulous as keeping JPGs below 20K (a
>rule from the early days when people surfed the web on
>slow modems)
Yuval, it's worse than these early days with 20K JPGs. ;-)
A Quicktime Object Movie is kind of a big database. All the single photos
are in it. Nothing is rendered or remapped in the viewer.
I had 360 photos: 10 rows with 36 photos each, covering the upper half
sphere in steps of 10?. My small filesize was 3.11MB. Makes an average size
for a photo of 8.8 KB for an image size of 480x480 pixels. The JPGs I
imported to quicktime had filesizes between 7 and 11 KB, The JPGs already
have heavy artifacts due to the high compression. And I had more rows. I
decided to toss the tree lowest because I wanted a flower rotating, not only
compression artifacts.
We are right now in the early days of object movies .... ;-)
This one from Andy Savage:
( Rules - What do we want to achieve from the WWP site?)
>For example the stunning object movie of the flower by Gabi Haindl
>is great but at nearly 7Mb its a bit heavy. Also I was expecting to
>be able to zoom in on the details of the flower structure but I see
>its not possible to zoom at all on it.
>Why can I not zoom in on detail?, would the file size need to be
>larger to do that?
Continuing my calculations ...
A fullscreen was to submit too. I assumed a photo of 800x800 pixels would be
enough for that. I hope that the free height in the browser of most of the
people is not higher, otherwise the picture would be scaled up and unsharp.
6.96 MB is the size of my fullscreen object, that makes an average filesize
of 19.8KB for an 800x800 pixel size photo!
To have the option to zoom in, you need a bigger photo that is displayed in
a small frame. Then you can zoom in.
Well, a bigger photo ... my source images had 1500x1500 pixels cropped to
their final size.
Highly compressed (with visible artifacts) one photo gives around 70 KB. 360
of them makes an object movie of aproximately 25 MB. Sadly that is still
nothing that can be presented on a website.
So yes Andy, even the heavy 7MB file is still too small to have the option
to zoom in a bit.
It is not only a huge file, what is in it is also a huge amount of photos.
It looks like one, but every image you can see in the viewer is one photo I
made and one photo stored in the object movie.
And my impression from all this discussions at the moment in the list:
I feel a bit displaced with my object movie in the WWP. Now more than the
moment I submitted it.
I thought long about if I should submit this object movie or a pano from
last year. I had not much time to pick panoramas. It's my hobby and I took
some days off every WWP event to shoot some to participate. If I had
submitted one of these, it would have been only the second best. The best of
every event of last year was already submitted.
This object however is something special for me because I improved my
equipment and the technics to do it. It is really my best object ever. Well,
hopefully not my last. ;-)
Oh, and I asked before submitting, to the list and then to Landis. He gave
me some filesize limits and I tried to fit to them.
Reading all the mails about the rules and about bending them, about
armchairtravel. All the efforts to integrate Google Earth and maps. Looks a
bit like it goes to a big sight seeing tour on earth.
Sadly I live in a more boring region. I can't compete with some great
landscape, parks, bridges, strange foreign buildings. Going only in that
direction would spare out some great submissions that I don't want to miss.
Caroling's panos, I remember a shower pano of Pete O'Donnell, a small
christmas crib of Tom! Striwisch and other unusual experimental vr's or just
crazy ideas, but all fitting to the theme. :-)
I would like to continue seeing full diversity of quicktime in the wwp. But
I would say, stick to that one fileformat. A viewer other than quicktime
might give problems on the different platforms and I personally dislike to
install too many different viewers/plugins. Watching collegues and friends
showed me too, that they even have problems to get used with quicktime.
Most problems makes the WWP entry page, btw. There is too much text to find
a fast entry to the site. I navigate fast on it, but all I have watched, who
are the first time on the wpp page have problems to get to the first
panorama and to find the overview map or thumbnail list. The panorama of the
day or random panorama catches the eye and gets a fast click, but then they
think that's it.
I'm trailing off ...
It's a great site that Don, Landis and Markus brought to life!
Keep it open for ideas!
Greetings from Germany!
Gabi Haindl
www.kugelblick.de