pin and align video question

Q&A about the latest versions
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skyfocus
Posts: 268
Joined: Sat Jun 12, 2010 10:52 am
Location: The Netherlands
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Hi,

I've followed the Pin and Align Video tutorial and tested it on my own project, its far from perfect, but with a little practice
I can get this to work. The thing I'm uncertain of is the part where you import the patch in PtGui, you have to enter lens settings manual, what should this be ? The patch is taken from the stitched panorama image, no lens is involved here. I shoot all my footage with a 8mm lens, but the patch is obviously no fisheye picture .... it is a flat normal picture in my eyes .....

Furthermore I encountered two problems in my project output that is not present in the example fountain example.

1) When dragging around the video with the mouse I can look around but when clicking my mouse over the video this does not work,
the pano is not turning, when placing the mouse outside the video it works. The fountain example does not have this issue.
when having a large video and it starts facing the video you can't look around ..... is this a setting I've missed ?

2) The test example I'm using is a windmill that is turning, I've made my video loopable to show continuous rotating. When the movie is running there is a hick-up when the video returns to it's beginning, the result is that it looks very unnatural that the mill stops turning for a second and then goes on again. Is this tweak-able ? Maybe smaller size or different video material ?

See: http://www.skyfocus.nl/SkyFocus/Tours/Balkbrug-DeStar/

Ps: After some testing , problem 1 and 2 looks like a flash problem (tested in Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera), when switching to the html5 version it's ok.

regards,

Arjan
Windows 10 Pro x64, Pano2VR pro V6.1.13 , Browser latest Firefox
Website: https://www.skyfocus.nl/
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JimWatters
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Joined: Thu Oct 07, 2010 6:16 pm
Location: Saint John, New Brunswick
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The video really adds to the panorama. Well done.

The Windmill video is pretty big in resolution. It is also missing a couple frames to make it an entire revolution.
I would crop in even tighter. Not sure if you even need to include the shadow. just a rectangle around the blades. The smaller the video the quicker it will download and start playing.

I would also make alternative webm versions available and two smaller at 1/2 resolution for them. This will help smaller devices to play the media smoother.

When you extract an image from a panorama a virtual camera is being used with the FoV, pan, tilt values listed.

The dragging are know issues. If you uncheck the prefer Flash on the HTML tab, them most people will get the HTML5 version.
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skyfocus
Posts: 268
Joined: Sat Jun 12, 2010 10:52 am
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Hi Jim,

Thanks for your reply, it will help me to improve this pinned video which looks awesome and really adds some realism.
I still have some questions left.
JimWatters wrote:The Windmill video is pretty big in resolution. It is also missing a couple frames to make it an entire revolution.
I've regenerated the video and I thinks its better now.
JimWatters wrote:I would crop in even tighter. Not sure if you even need to include the shadow. just a rectangle around the blades. The smaller the video the quicker it will download and start playing.
What size would be small enough and not too small ? I've shrunk the video to 500x500 pixels but the part that is actually moving is only 20% of that frame. The video is now 1,9Mb for the mp4 and only 130Kb for the webm version.
JimWatters wrote:I would also make alternative webm versions available and two smaller at 1/2 resolution for them. This will help smaller devices to play the media smoother.
The webm construction I know I can put in extra beneath the .mp4 file. But how does this work with the 1/2 resolution video's where is the mechanism to select these files and how to configure ?
JimWatters wrote:When you extract an image from a panorama a virtual camera is being used with the FoV, pan, tilt values listed.
Ok, I understand, but PtGui asks for focal length and crop factor, in the example 10,5 and 1,5x is used. Where do these numbers come from ?
JimWatters wrote:The dragging are know issues. If you uncheck the prefer Flash on the HTML tab, them most people will get the HTML5 version.
Hmmm, in some cases I would like to have the flash version first, is this issue something that will be fixed in the near future or is it not important because the world is moving to html5 ?
I do like the (skin)scaling in flash and the artificial lensflare. When that is implemented in the html5 version I'll output in html5 only ...

The last issue is that the video is not showing on my iPad , with normal video I had at least the option to start stop the video ....

regards,

Arjan
Windows 10 Pro x64, Pano2VR pro V6.1.13 , Browser latest Firefox
Website: https://www.skyfocus.nl/
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JimWatters
Posts: 329
Joined: Thu Oct 07, 2010 6:16 pm
Location: Saint John, New Brunswick
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No more jumping as it turns around. Very smooth looping.

The video does not need to be square. You do need to crop symmetrically. This is easily done in Photoshop by holding down the Alt key.
Because some of the shadow is missing from the video I would probably eliminate it. Then you can center the video on the blades of the windmill and crop to just the blades. Then use the full resolution of the video at this crop.

Ignore PTGui asking about focal length and crop factor. It only asks this to estimate FoV, which is what it really needs.

Bugs that only show up in Flash are definitely not a priority any more.
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