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sandbox / panoramic video field test

March 27th, 2004
Panoramic Video Field Test
360 One VR with Sony PC100 mini DV camcorder

Below are three still images taken from my field test of my Sony PC 100 hooked up to a 360 One VR and mounted to my car. Clicking on any of the three images will take you to a 9mb QuickTime Video. (same file for all three)

The quality is of course limited do to the low resolution of the camera (720x480) , but I was surprised at the level of detail that showed up in the final images.

Click here for detail on the hardware setup and workflow.


added on 04.29.04
Click here to view the Interactive Spriteorama version authored by Bill Meikle with VR HotWires.








Below are details about the hardware setup and the workflow for preparing the video:

Hardware:
  • For starters, I should not that mine is not the factory 360 One VR. I have removed the main coupling and instead drilled three holes in the Lexan dics to attach the threaded coupling Then I attached the 4.25" extension tube and then my camcorder; with the help of a few step-up rings. As to why I modified the 360 One VR. There a number of reasons, but at the top was to find a good way to pair with my DSLR, while also making the device more portable. Another advantage of the direct connection of the Lexan disc to the extension tube is no reflections from the bottom of the disc.
  • For the handheld shot hooked the camera rig up to a tripod and held it loosely where the tripod met the camera. The goal here was to help keep the camera steady with a more natural movement.
  • For the car top shot I used a super-clamp and a ballhead to mount the camera to the metal frame around the sunroof. I think I can improve on this - the sunroof glass was poor chose because it is not that stable itself.
  • The shot inside the car was a similar setup to the roof-top except that I needed to use a Bogen Magic Arm to position the camera in the right location. Below are pictures of both setups
  • While I found things were smooth at slow speeds on smooth road it got worse as I went faster. I think most of the problem is with the mounting as I think the cameras system itself is pretty rigid, of course high wind will make the post vibrate some. Although the PC100 has great steady shot ability I can't use it with this setup as its not intended for a reflection map like this.


Workflow:

To start off with the workflow here is what the camera saw. Click on the image below to view a short video clip (1mb)

  • So the first step is of course to shoot the footage onto mini DV tape
  • I then imported this to the computer using iMovie
  • Next was an export as image file at 10FPS to 720x480 jpg files.
  • I ran a batch in photoshop to de-interlace and fix the aspect ratio, in the process I up-sampled to 1024x768. (as a note I found out that batches go much quicker in Photoshop if it is not the active application. I assume because its not rendering to the screen.
  • Then I Launched Photo Warp and batch conversions of all the images at roughly 2pix/degree. There are some hickups in this as its not intended to batch convert 7000 images at once and it was tempermental at times. Chunks of 1000 however did just fine.
  • One last step back in PS now was to offset the images to make the forward facing direction in the center of the screen. I could not find a way to set this across the board in Photo Warp.
  • Then I open as image sequence in QuickTime Pro at 25FPS (this is 2.5x faster than normal speed). I then set the video size to half and exported it at 10FPS to cut down file size. Then I opened it back up and saved it at double size to increase its size on screen. I did not give up much detail in the half size.

Although I think PhotoWarp is great I can see just setup up the entire correction workflow in PS to cut down on the steps. This can be done relatively well through barrel distortion correction and polar to rectangular conversions.


Here are a few other videos of my camcorder hooked mounted to cars,
both using the Century Optics fisheye lens.
Video with Sony PC 100 attached to remote control car
High speed driving video (not driving fast, just sped up) - 4mb


page last edited on 04.29.04


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