wwp@yahoogroups.com:
Re: My "work in progress" from Chicago ...
Hans Nyberg 2004-Mar-27 20:24:00
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#