Panoramic video??

[andythefilmer]

So I do a lot of specialty photography including things like 360 degree photos, so I am somewhat familiar with all of the 3D tools in CS5. However, I am curious if it is at all possible to shoot something, say 5 cameras arranged in a panoramic configuration, lenses matched and what not, and then stich it together in photoshop... Is this possible or is there a way to do this, perhaps not in photoshop? Just thought I'd ask... Thanks!

[nosys70]

if you can do it in photoshop, you can do it too for video since video is just a bunch of pictures.

convert your video in a suite of picture, process it as picture then recombine resulting pictures as video.
there are special stitching programs that works better than photoshop you can use as well.

The only problem is to have synched video, because a fast moving object passing from one camera to another would be misaligned or even appears twice.

the easiest would be to shoot with a RED camera at 4K with a special panoramic mirror, so you get the 360 view in one shot.

You can also buy a 360 cam made from 5 small firewire cams arranged on each side of a cube but it cost the hell, the nice thing is
it is stitched in realtime.

[andythefilmer]

Is there any sort of program or plugin that lets you merge one set of pictures and then give it that same rule for the rest of the frames? Kinda like a batch type of a thing... I didn't think of the movement confusing it..

[nickmarshallvfx]

Hi there, new to the forums, this is my first post, but thought I would chip in.

This is totally possible to do as I've seen it done before, but is always tougher than stitching stills. Its much easier when shooting 360 stills to throw the camera on a nodal head and get perfect increments for your lens, as you dont need to worry about taking the photos at the same time. For your video, you will have to try and manually set this up as best you can, but you will never be shooting from exactly the same nodal point. If you make sure you are shooting as close as possible though, you can still get acceptable results.
I would suggest that you will need a dedicated compositing package for this, such as Nuke or Shake rather than photoshop, and you will need to delens the footage before you begin (so make doubly sure you have the lens info from the shoot!). It will likely still need some cleanup, which is a lot less straight forward with motion picture than stills also, especially if you are not familiar with the software.

It can definitely be done with a little love and lots of time tho. Also be sure to avoid lens artefacting on the shoot, as lens flares will suddenly stop at the stitch point, and are a pain to remove.

Hope it helps!
Nick

[nosys70]

yes there is an utility (basically a GUI for an other utility) called PTGui and PTview.
you take a sample picture of each video, stitch them (you will need about 30% overlap to get reference point in each picture).
Then you save the settings and you can process all the remaining pictures the same way.
The main problem is to have the camera properly synchronized, because else, you will get an object passing from one camera to the other slightly misaligned).
if you shoot 60p, you can get better sync (or smaller drift) so it could be acceptable.

[RGBaker]

I have had a lot of fun with my Sony Bloggie Panorama camera -- it shoots a 360 degree panorama onto a 1920x1080 30p annulus. From that source file I use Bloggievideounwarp ( http://www.flong.com/blog/2010/open-...ks-processing/ ) to create a ProRes file -- this looks immensely better than the awful software Sony supplies to deliver a mediocre wmv file -- which can be edited in an ordinary way in Final Cut. Sometimes I prefer to generate a version from the now flattened by unwarper file that uses a window view -- my experience is many viewers can't relate to a 360 degree view when presented with the entire view at once -- and for that I use tools I found at this site http://www.ryubin.com/panolab/panoflash/index.html I'm not enamored of Ryubin's direct from annulus abilities, so typically I use the flat video view from the unwarped file, but in fact you can go direct from an annulus using this software. The 'advantage' here is you get a window view where the viewer chooses to pan around the image -- easier to comprehend, though less exotic a view.

I haven't worked with stills, though I believe that Ryubin's software will. Check the Downloads page for various examples -- with a little time and experimenting I figured out how the XML system worked from there.

Follows are two images to help explain what is being done -- they've been down sized to make them fit, the unwarped file is otherwise very wide.

MAH00266.jpgMAH00266_unwarped_2.jpg

Cheers,
GB