wwp@yahoogroups.com:
Re: My "work in progress" from Chicago ... Reply to Hans N.
Victor Zaveduk 2004-Mar-27 21:38:00
Re: My "work in progress" from Chicago ...Hans,
Thanks you for the reply ... and WOW !! that reworking is incredible. I'd
pretty much come to the same conclusion re. the grass as being a source of
problems. Sharpening tended to make it jump out to the point of being
painful and I had not yet got around to trying my hand at masking it yet.
Someone else also suggested bring up some "green" in that area, even if it
was not there in reality :) ... it is only barely spring here still ... but
it does make the scene look more "natural" have green-ish lawn areas.
I'll have to give VRWorx a look. PanoCube is very nice, but for
cylindricals I felt sure there must be better tools.
BTW, the compression in the image posted online was set at 75 (in PanoCube)
for an image of 7200x3600 originally. The stitched image was created as a
cylindrical projection in PanoTools, but as you noted there isn't really a
visible problem in having it mapped to a cubic projection ... at least not
in this case.
The extra "black" portions do compress well, but as you point out they
increase the overhead, uneccessarily in my opinion, as the whole point is to
have a cylindrical view in the first place.
Thank you very much for the help, the pointing in the right directions, and
the hints/tips. I must say I'm mighty impressed with the way the image
looks in your version. THAT'S much more towards where I have been striving
towards in the first place and why I have been so focused/frustrated by the
tools and methods I've had at hand. I now have a very specific standard to
work towards. :)
All the best ...
Victor
-----Original Message-----
From: Hans Nyberg [mailto:#removed#]
Sent: Saturday, March 27, 2004 2:24 PM
To: #removed#; Victor Zaveduk
Subject: Re: My "work in progress" from Chicago ...
Hi Victor and all
I have been following this tread as I get a lot of questions about
creating movies on PC.
First let me say that your pano looks very good but your main problem is
to much sharpen.
Unfortunately there is no free tool to make a reasonable cylindric movie
on a PC.
The only software which has the settings you need is PanoWorx and VRWorx
However they are not very good for stitching.
I have tested GoCubic and it seems to work very good but it has no
settings for
the initial FOV and it sets this to around 60% which is too much zoomed in
for most cylindric movies. However you can change this setting in the html
file.
Another setting which is important is the quality for motion.
All the free tools also Make Panorama on Mac sets it to low.
This causes the very irritating flimmering effect.
PanoCube can not change this settings as far as I can see.
MakeCubic can.
Especially if you sharpen the pano as much as you do, it looks awfull.
More on LCD than on a CRT
Most computers will today pan smooth also with a Quality of Medium or
High
Especiallly PC where Quicktime VR actually performs better than on Mac.
To make a Cubic movie from a Cylindric movie with a FOV of only 60-70 is
not a good solution. The size of your image is about 25 mb. When you ad
black
to make it spheric you increase it to 74.2 mb The compressed movie will
only
increase with about 10% as black compresses easy but it is the
uncompressed
movie you have to keep in memory when you have downloaded it.
If you make a cylindric movie you can easy make it 8000-10000 wide.
I have one at Panoramas.dk which is 15264x2032 Compression 25% size 2.2mb
Uncompressed 88.7 mb
http://www.panoramas.dk/fullscreen/fullscreen36.html
There is no problem viewing it even on a 6 year old Mac with 128 mb Ram
Something else is that you can not just convert it to spheric like Andrew
says in his
Readme file for PanoCube.
This is from Panocubes readme:
> If you have cylinder panorama - just add two black strips (above and
below) to
> get 2:1 width:height ratio and then using the script limit min/max pitch
.
THIS DOES NOT WORK
If your panoramic image is a cylindric pano you have to convert it to
spherical projection first. For example with panotools.
Some stitchers like Canon Photostitch make
cylinders as default others like Photovista make spherical.
I have seen a lot of panoramas on the net which have been done after
PanoCubes directions and where subjects at the top and bottom are deformed
because of this.The problem increases with FOV
I did not know that PanoCube recomended this until today after I
downloaded
it to check it out.
Of course you get the same problem if you use a spherical projection and
make
a cylinder from it.
In the Chicago pano you will not see it because you do not have any
straight
lines close to the top or bottom. Actually I can not see if it is
cylindric or Spherical
However the main reason why you can not get a smaller movie is that you
have
used to much sharpen. About 30% of the image is grass and when you sharpen
that, JPG can not compress it. This is exactly the same for images as it
is
for QTVR.
Also noise in almost black areas can do this. The movie for this week at
panoramas.dk had noise in the sky looking black on the PC but with
visible
noise at gamma 1.8 It was reduced in size from 2.2 mb to 1.2 after
darkening the sky. With the same compression.
I have made an experiment with your move. I extracted the image and made a
softening layer of the grass. I also removed a little magenta in the grass
to ad very little green. I made a cylindric movie with compression 40%
Size is now 1.34 mb. Sharpness is the same in the buildings.
http://www.panoramas.dk/chicago/
According to the info I get from your movie you have used low 25% but I am
not sure that this is correct. It does not look like it in the sky.
Remember that it was alredy compressed. You can get better result from
your
original. I would not recomend more compression than 40% in your case
because of the blue sky. You will get banding. But you can probably get
down
to 1.1 mb just by making an image with a little less sharpening also for
the rest of the image. Remember there is a large difference when you look
at it on a LCD monitor.
Hans
<http://www.panoramas.dk>
Hans Nyberg
commercial photographer
hans nyberg fotografi
hasselvej 6 DK-8550 ryomgaard denmark
<http://www.hans-nyberg.dk>
<http://www.qtvr.dk>
<http://www.virtualdenmark.dk>Denmark in QTVR Panoramas
<http://www.panoramas.dk> Panoramas.dk - Features Fullscreen QTVR
email: #removed#
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