Choppy pano - help

[Peter1980]

A new client is waiting for me to email the panos and I just can't stand to send them the jumpy pano that I have. What am I doing wrong? I tried changing every setting but to no avail--the panning is horribly choppy. I even tried using much smaller jpgs to create the mov file before converting to flash pano with pano2vr, and still--choppy!

Here's an example: http://www.stonehomephoto.com/panos/21w ... /Mbed.html

Help!!

[360Texas]

Nice photo, Suggest you slow the rotation speed down to .2 That is 2ths of 1 degree turn.

Thanks for giving us that URL.

[Peter1980]

Thanks for the response. I tried reducing the "pan speed" to 0.2 as suggested, but the result was the same choppy pano.

Here's a pano I just uploaded that is exhibiting this same problematic choppiness/jitteriness: http://www.stonehomephoto.com/panos/31a ... front.html

Any other suggestions?

[360Texas]

Im on Vista ultima sp2 with a nVidia 8800 video card and dual 24 inch Samsung monitors. The rotation speed is predicated on the graphics card refresh rate. The faster video card.. faster the [rotate .2 th's of 1 degree read 'screen refresh rate'] rotation. You said you set the rotation at .2 .. for us .. that is still too fast. On older video cards it might be viewed slower.

Other suggestion might be the zoom in/out values. The last one you showed us.. was zoomed out too far. The value of 50 is normal eye sight. I usually set ours to initial FOV of 55. The Viewing Parameters we use are FoV 55 and then below Field of View (Zoom) Min 50 and Max 110.

Where the values are expressed as degrees of view on the horizon.

Normal FoV set at around 50 - 60 degrees of view. Helps keep the image rotating smoother.
Zoom in (min) can only see a short 50 degrees wide view on the horizon. Keeps the visitor from zooming in too far and image goes pixelated.
Zoom out (max) can see a wide angle of view of 110 degrees view on the horizon. Keeps the visitor from zooming out too far and image goes into a barrel view.

Hope that helps

Going out to vote tonight.. I ll check back later around 7pm Central Texas time.

[Peter1980]

Hi 360:
Thanks for the post.
I'm running a few month old iMac 3.06gHz core2duo w 4gb ram. If I'm getting this jittery pano, I can only imagine how bad the pano is on lesser computers. My intention is to make the panos fast loading yet with smooth motion.

I did what you suggested and changed the fov to 60, with the min at 50 and max at 110. This does look better--thanks for the suggestion. However, it's still jumpy. Have a look: http://www.stonehomephoto.com/panos/31a ... front.html

The rest of the other panos exhibit the same problem: http://www.stonehomephoto.com/index/31a_dixon.html

Thanks again.

Any ideas to make this auto panning smoother??

[Sebastian]

The pano works fine here, using PC and mac book pro (firefox)

What you experience it's not just due to computer spec but most likely Adobe Flash player in Safari browser. It's unfortunate but Safari is still a bit behind when comes to performance, not just Flash but other active contents. If you view the panorama in another browser, like FireFox on Mac, or any Windows browser,
you will notice the performance is much better. In fact on my PC it's looks very nice, smooth and all... the only problem i found was the stitching error here and there....

[360Texas]

Ah good point about the browser. I overlooked Safari's performance issues.

[Carl Lamb]

It also looks like you're using a cylindrical projection method, the horizontal lines seem to bend rather a lot.

[Peter1980]

Sebastian: Thanks for pointing that out. yes, it seems to work better in firefox. Also, I noticed that it works fine in safari when in full-screen mode. Strange. Anyway, I'm glad to know it's more or less resolved.

Ambientlight: I'm not sure what you mean by "cylindrical projection method"? What can I do to limit the bending horizontal lines?

Thanks.

[360Texas]

If the panorama appears to have too much barrel distortion.. like looking inside of barrel or tube (straight lines curved) ... then suggest you set your intial field of view to zoom in a little bit more - that will straighten lines

[Carl Lamb]

Your intial post says you created a .mov file then converted it to flash. I suspect that the initial .mov uses cylindrical projection. If possible when creating the initial file use cubic projection, or better still drop your equirectangular panorama image straight into pano2vr and let it do the conversion for you.

Obviously I don't know what software your using to create the intial .mov file.

I also agree with 360texas that the interior shots rotation speed needs trimming down. This will help alleviate the choppiness too.