wwp@yahoogroups.com:
Re: HOW TO GET STARTED?
Roger Howard 2005-Jan-21 03:52:00
On Jan 20, 2005, at 6:59 PM, tflyfish2002 wrote:
>
>
> I am new to the forum so I hope youyy will not mind me adding my 2
> cents worth.
Not at all! And I hope you don't mind my reply :)
> I have both PT gui and Realviz 4. I love Realviz for a number of
> reasons, but first I will agree that due to the not so good
> documentation it is hard to learn although Realviz have a number of
> excellent onlione tutorials, the problem being that most of the
> tutorials are for a older version and leave out some of the important
> features of version 4
That's interesting... while I agree the docs stink, I never found the
app particularly hard to learn - kinda the opposite, I found myself
quickly asking, "is that it? can't I go a little deeper? do I have to
stop here?"
> I shoot multirow pano's and boy it's nice to be able to zoom in on the
> Editor window to get to close alignment, once this is done you hit
> stitch and the image is stitched to it's partner. No need for lenghty
> lens calibration, that is done very quickly and can be saved for
> future use.
I've seen shots froom the same lens/camera result in very different
lens calibration values in Stitcher... frankly, this is another case of
not being able to trust it - since there's virtually no manual controls
it's a product that requires a lot of faith, and I've seen enough
flakey results to not have that faith! By the same token, I don't find
PT lens calibration routine to be lengthy - it's basically steps 3 and
5 of my 9 (10) steps I posted earlier. And those values can also be
saved and re-applied to future projects.
> Were Realivz is really great is at the output stage, if you output to
> QTVR cubes or movies, you can preview the output window and make any
> changes to the QTVR setting to see how it looks, that's interactively,
> Try doing that with PT..
Well, none of the PT tools pretend to be good at outputting QTVR. Most
folks output a TIFF or PSD, then bring that into
CubicConverter/CubicConnector or PanoCube, where they get all this same
power (I much prefer these tools to Stitcher's QTVR output).
> Also 16 bit is no problem for Realviz, input or output (NOt QTVR
> obviously)You can add hotspots as well.
Frankly, while I appreciate the 16 bit advantage in certain parts of
the workflow, i don't see any benefit to bringing a 16bit file into
PanoTools or Stitcher. I've never been able to discern a difference,
and given the increased memory/disk requirements, it'd take a visible
demonstration for me to justify it. I'd love to be proven wrong, as if
throwing more bits at the problem can improve my output, awesome!
> Try the Realviz stencil function, this masks parts of any image that
> you might want to lose of maybe keep. Although you can output directly
> to Photoshop dynamically, there is hardly any need with stencils.
I never liked that tool myself - I always preferred to output to
layered PSD (the only reason I got a Stitcher 4 license - of course,
PSD output was buggy for months after release!) and then control the
blending myself. These days, I use enblend 99% of the time with no
extra effort - the rest of the time, I use enblend, then blend the
output with any of the input files I might need to correct a ghost or
two.
> Do yourself a favor and download a copy. I don't think that it can
> totally replace PT tools, but for most work it can.
Different strokes for different folks. I can appreciate that... but I
will say, I was an ardent Stitcher user, in fact I was thrilled when it
first came to the Mac platform when RealVIZ started shedding their
workstation roots.