Quality not as good as other users of FPP ? HMMMM

[DMCDigital]

Hello All,

I cant seem to get the quality like these guys are....they are both flash...what gives ? I take a large sphereical JPEG and use Cubic Converter to make it a .mov ...I have tried a hundered different sizes and my panos have that twinkle/swimmy look... Segments= 45 Static and Motion quality are on best see comparisons below .

Nice quality :
http://www.AlohaStateMedia.com/29Waikai/photo.html.

Nice Quality (Click on the nexus viewer)
http://www.virtually-anywhere.com/pricing/

My viewer - not too bad but still twinkle/swimmy..hhhmmmm

http://www.dmcdigitalmedia.com/hostvt/flashbeta/index.html

[neil]

Hi DMCDigital,

The first example you posted has a 2.5MB panorama that has plenty of information for full screen and zooming. The second example is around 700kb, and although it is a little softer, it downloads much quicker. So there are compromises to be worked out with the physical dimensions of your cubefaces, the amount of compression you apply and the final file size.

Your file is "sparkling" when moving due to a number of possible reasons. Too much sharpening of the original image (try using a more subtle Unsharp filter). The cube faces may be much bigger than the final movie size and the resulting playback may be distorting the lines in the image. The motion quality may be set too low (the static image looks fine). Or possibly the segments could be set too high - 45 is a high setting and requires a lot more processing, particularly when the autorotation is asking your screen to refresh a lot of information quickly.

Sorry if the above suggestions sound a little vague. The ideal recipe differs from pano to pano, depending on your shooting and post-production style.

Neil

[Stephmw]

I agree about perceived quality... my current solution is to let the user decide:

http://stephanemw.googlepages.com/be4_panorama.html

It seems to be going down fairly well *but* I should perhaps make the pixelated versions only show up on mouseover :-)

[DMCDigital]

Hi All,

I found if I make the .mov size 1600 x 1200 coming out of Cubic Converter rather than 640 x 480 like I was, quality improves and I lowered my segments from 45 down to 30. what are some of your workflows ?


cheers!

Dennis

[HansNyberg]

The display size you use has nothing at to do with the quality.
You can make a 100x150pix or a 1000x1500 and they are identical.

What you can change to make difference when you display it in Flashpanoramas is the compression. And of course your real resolution is important.
To display a decent quality in fullscreen your original should be at least 4800x2400 and from that you get a cubeface of around 1400x1400.

For better quality on large screens with 1280x1024 or similar you need a little more. I use 1600x1600 cubefaces as a standard. Compression in CubicConverter can be set to around 40-50% if you have a lot of details but with large flat areas in the image I do not go to less than 50% as this will give you banding.

Hans

[DMCDigital]

My pano Jpeg was 4188 x 2094 imported into Cubic Converter and it yielded a cube face of about 1332 x 1332...with you so far...
Next in Movie settings the default movie export size is 400 x 300, I had been setting it to 640 x 480. When exported the quicktime mov at 1600 x 1200 and then loaded that .mov into FPP the resulting play back was signifigantly better. I changed segments from 45 down to 30 and the quality was stilll far better than when I used a 640 x 480 .mov and segments=45.

No Disrespect intended... are lightyears ahead of me with FPP, but i did see an improvement. Do U have a link of one of your panos i could see ?

My Rig is a DUAL 2.0 G5/23" Cinema display and nvidia 6800GT using safari/opera or firefox yeilds the same results. Still not as smooth or fast running as the other samples I posted though

[HansNyberg]

The segments settings are important but it has to be combined with the settings for quality motion.
You can use 45 with low motion quality but you still have shimmering effects when panning.
If you use quality motion medium and set the segments at somewhere like 25 -30 you can control it much better.
JUst remember that if you use autorotation the settings for quality motion can be set to low in the autorotation settings without affecting the quality for mouse panning. Autorotation needs low settings to work smooth.

Use the editor to find exactly the setting you like.
You can of course put the editor in your own panorama for that and then just remove it when you have found your settings.
http://flashpanoramas.com/blog/2007/05/28/editor-plugin-v10-beta/

As I said display size on a QTVR can not affect anything when flashpanoramas extracts the cubefaces. If you have got different quality you must have done something else.
Flashpanoramas just fetches the cubeface images within the QTVR. Nothing else.
Maybe you made different tiling. Not sure how that effects it besides the way the pano loads.

Hans