Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde

[Lin Evans]

Hi,

This is a single slide slideshow. Well, actually three if you count the title and ending slides but the main slide is 10 megabytes and about 6,000 by 1500 pixels in dimensions. I was wondering how smoothly it plays on different levels of video cards, etc., so would appreciate some feedback on this.

http://www.lin-evans.net/p2e/cliffpalace.zip

Best regards,

Lin

[d67]

Hi Lin

Everything (zoom and pan) is working very fine and smoothly.

Only the last transition effect (circle) is very slightly hesitating.

Win Xp SP2

CPU AMD Athlon 1200 MHz

Memory 512 MB

GeForce2 MX/MX 400 RAM 32 MBytes

VideoMode 1024 by 768 pixels, True Color, 60 Hertz

DirectX 9.0c

added

I forgot to mention the aspect of introduction slide as frets3

[frets3]

Hi, Lin,

Wonderful panorama! Would have liked to see more of the mouse at the bottom of the breached kiiva :>)

In every aspect, the animation runs smooth as silk on a 256 mb Radeon X600 in 32-bit color mode (Pentium 4: 3.2 ghz). However, the right side of the title text was off the screen (1280 x 1024).

David

[Lin Evans]

Hi Patrick,

Thank you so much for the feedback. One picture is worth many words and helped me immediately identify the problem.

This is a great lesson for me in why one should rasterize text to png. The font I used on the text wasn't found on your computer so Windows substituted a font which is in its native size a good bit larger. I used Viner Hand and didn't rasterize to a PNG. I have corrected that now so it should now display properly.

I think the circle transition is a bit too much for the graphics environment already nearly at capacity with the size of the image plus zooms and pans. I swapped it for a "gates" open from center which I "think" uses less horsepower.

Thanks again,

Lin

Hi Lin

Everything (zoom and pan) is working very fine and smoothly.

Only the last transition effect (circle) is very slightly hesitating.

Win Xp SP2

CPU AMD Athlon 1200 MHz

Memory 512 MB

GeForce2 MX/MX 400 RAM 32 MBytes

VideoMode 1024 by 768 pixels, True Color, 60 Hertz

DirectX 9.0c

added

I forgot to mention the aspect of introduction slide as frets3

[Lin Evans]

Hi David,

Thanks much! The brown one or the white one with half an ear missing? I corrected the problem with the font which was due to my mistake in using an uncommon font without rasterizing to PNG. I've done that now so text should display properly. The font Windows substituted is larger at identical point size than Viner Hand which I used. I also changed the circle transition on the end slide to a center open "gate" which I hope uses a bit less processing power and should work better on Patrick's system.

Since Patrick gets a smooth response, I suspect this will play well on nearly any computer because his system has minimal video processing power and has been a great measuring stick for other slideshows.

Best regards,

Lin

Hi, Lin,

Wonderful panorama! Would have liked to see more of the mouse at the bottom of the breached kiiva :>)

In every aspect, the animation runs smooth as silk on a 256 mb Radeon X600 in 32-bit color mode (Pentium 4: 3.2 ghz). However, the right side of the title text was off the screen (1280 x 1024).

David

[d67]

I think the circle transition is a bit too much for the graphics environment already nearly at capacity with the size of the image plus zooms and pans. I swapped it for a "gates" open from center which I "think" uses less horsepower.

Hello Lin

Everything is OK now, from first slide to last transition effect

As I only commented technical aspects of your trial, I missed to tell you that your shots are really great. The sensation of depth is fantastic !

Only one aspect bothers me : is there a slight blue dominant ?

This is particularily sensible on nude tree branchs and on the cement (?) where the 2 persons, on the right hand of your panorama, are staying.

They are frankly looking blue (branchs) to light blue (cement).

[jevans]

Hi Lin,

Great panorama. Runs very smoothly except for very slight hesitation near the end. Same problem with text not fitting the screen as you have realised. My system is :

Win Xp SP2

CPU 1.15 AMD Athlone

2.5GB memory (I do a lot of work in Photoshop !)

Graphics Nvidia GEForce 7300 GT with 256 MB on card memory

Video Mode 1280 x 1024 highest bit colour, 70Khz

When using a panorama, I think the overall length is limited by the total window size in the O&A edit window. Is that correct or is there some way of having a much longer panorama by joining successive slides?

Regards

Jeff

[LumenLux]

Lin,

With your skills in this "day of digital", the Cliff Palace is possibly more impressive in your presentation than when I have been there in person (many years ago.) What a great use of panorama and zoom. On my 3.ghz, ATI Radeon x600 pro, all movement was smooth.

Aesthetically, I am still "unsettled" with:

Your maximum zoom points (of course) are just un-clear enough to be distractive in some instances. That aspect reminds me of my very first Version 5 experiment, over a year ago. In Spirits in the Sky, shots of Machu Pichu, would "blur-up" before reaching the detail size I wanted to try. Your Cliff Palace image is larger and finer than the shots I was using, but ultimately the distractive fuzzy-point was reached. Would you mind saying what the maximum zoom percentage, as shown in the PTE work window, was? I am bringing this up as I am still trying to determine my personal criteria for zoom strength in my own presentations. Realizing there are many, many, factors, - I am not looking for a "rule" but only the thoughts of you and others on the point.

Thank you for your continued valuable input in this forum.

[baldsparky]

Hi Lin

Athlon 64 processor 3700+

2Gb Ram

nvidia geforce 7600gs video card

screen resolution 1440x900.

Everything ran fine on my system

Kind

regards

Paul

[Lin Evans]

Thanks Patrick,

Good catch. I went back and checked my originals (no problem) and discovered that I had an incorrect blending parameter set in my stitching software. At first I thought it was only a reflection from the blue sky on the fresh pavement on the far right because of the abrupt change at the point where the new pavement met the crushed rock/sand walk, but then I noticed that on the far left side the bush had strong bluish overtones on the bare areas. After restitching with the proper color/blend parameters and a quick check in Photoshop it looks proper. I corrected in the smaller pano used for the title and ending as well and re-zipped and loaded.

It's good to hear that even the transition went fine this time.

Thanks,

Lin

Hello Lin

Everything is OK now, from first slide to last transition effect

As I only commented technical aspects of your trial, I missed to tell you that your shots are really great. The sensation of depth is fantastic !

Only one aspect bothers me : is there a slight blue dominant ?

This is particularily sensible on nude tree branchs and on the cement (?) where the 2 persons, on the right hand of your panorama, are staying.

They are frankly looking blue (branchs) to light blue (cement).

[Lin Evans]

Hi Jeff,

I've redone it with a different transition which should be much better and rasterized the text so that should fit fine now too.

You can actually have any size panorama, but the wider it is, the smaller the overall appearance will be when trying to display the entire frame without panning if you size it with the bounding rectangle to fit the monitor aspect ratio. For the title show, I just opened the original in Photoshop then set then copied and pasted to a giant screen with the grey background. Then I set the crop tool for 1024x758 for the proper aspect ratio on my monitor and cropped to the extreme of the horizontal dimensions leaving whatever vertical grey space remaining.

The interesting thing is trying to determin which zoom percentage equals a 1:1 from the original. More on this below in my answer about the zoom percentages.

Best regards,

Lin

Hi Lin,

Great panorama. Runs very smoothly except for very slight hesitation near the end. Same problem with text not fitting the screen as you have realised. My system is :

Win Xp SP2

CPU 1.15 AMD Athlone

2.5GB memory (I do a lot of work in Photoshop !)

Graphics Nvidia GEForce 7300 GT with 256 MB on card memory

Video Mode 1280 x 1024 highest bit colour, 70Khz

When using a panorama, I think the overall length is limited by the total window size in the O&A edit window. Is that correct or is there some way of having a much longer panorama by joining successive slides?

Regards

Jeff

[Lin Evans]

Lin,

With your skills in this "day of digital", the Cliff Palace is possibly more impressive in your presentation than when I have been there in person (many years ago.) What a great use of panorama and zoom. On my 3.ghz, ATI Radeon x600 pro, all movement was smooth.

Thanks! I just pulled up some old frames from several years ago to test the limits for the less than optimal video environments.

Aesthetically, I am still "unsettled" with:

Your maximum zoom points (of course) are just un-clear enough to be distractive in some instances. That aspect reminds me of my very first Version 5 experiment, over a year ago. In Spirits in the Sky, shots of Machu Pichu, would "blur-up" before reaching the detail size I wanted to try. Your Cliff Palace image is larger and finer than the shots I was using, but ultimately the distractive fuzzy-point was reached. Would you mind saying what the maximum zoom percentage, as shown in the PTE work window, was? I am bringing this up as I am still trying to determine my personal criteria for zoom strength in my own presentations. Realizing there are many, many, factors, - I am not looking for a "rule" but only the thoughts of you and others on the point.

Actually, I pushed the zoom beyond proprietary limits because I didn't want to interpolate the original which I really should do to zoom in this far. These were done with my old Canon 1D (4.48 megapixel) and to test the zoom against 1:1 I opened the original uninterpolated stitched pano in Irfanview at full 100% size then zoomed the pano to match. The match point for 1:1 on this pano was 600 on the zoom.

On the far right at the first zoom I reached 660 which is still acceptable. The next zoom with the wooden ladders was pushing it at 832. The portion zoomed to the rock "bench" was 1013 and the final zoom was 1192 which was nearly double the 100% and further than this image will really support for optimal crispness by a good percentage.

I use a Sigma SD14 for this type thing these days and it will easily support a 300% zoom and still maintain optimal crispness, but the AA filter on my Canon, Nikon and older Kodak dSLR will not go much over 150% without doing what you noticed. At 150% I should limit the zoom on this pano to not more than 900 and I've exceeded that twice. The "ladder" portion actually looks fine to me, but the bench and the last zoom are over the top.

It's still quite possible to do zoom much closer than the current closest zoom with this pano but it would require interpolation to get it (the pano) up to a much larger file size. I've printed really sharp 16x20's of the individual five frames comprising this pano so I would be very comfortable in enlarging the original by a substantial amount, but just zooming in with PTE won't do it at these extremes.

I was afraid that if I interpolated and had too large a file size, then it would not work well on video challenged systems. It's all a learning experience so perhaps I'll do that and try it again for testing to see how much more a 32 meg video card will withstand.

Thanks,

Best regards,

Lin

Postscript: I've just recompiled it and uploaded to original link with no zooms over 832 so should be within good limits now.

`

Thank you for your continued valuable input in this forum.

[Lin Evans]

Hi Paul,

Thanks much for the feedback. I've altered it a bit with a re-stitch and re-blend to remove the blue sidewalk, etc. I may tweak it a bit more by less zoom on some frames.

Best regards,

Lin

Hi Lin

Athlon 64 processor 3700+

2Gb Ram

nvidia geforce 7600gs video card

screen resolution 1440x900.

Everything ran fine on my system

Kind

regards

Paul

[Ken Cox]

well i get to see the corrected perfect show

-sound, colours, p/z etc all perfect - a beauty that one

now

lets see you do it in 3d -- the spirits will jump right out at you

kids gave me 2 pair paper 3d glasses for fathers day

2.8 ghz intel, 1 gb ram, 1 gb swap and ati agp 2006 all in wonder with 256 ram

ken

[Lin Evans]

Hey Ken,

LOL - that should be a fun one to try - I'll work on it. That was nice of them to fix you up so both of you can watch in living 3D color!!

Best regards,

Lin

well i get to see the corrected perfect show

-sound, colours, p/z etc all perfect - a beauty that one

now

lets see you do it in 3d -- the spirits will jump right out at you

kids gave me 2 pair paper 3d glasses for fathers day

2.8 ghz intel, 1 gb ram, 1 gb swap and ati agp 2006 all in wonder with 256 ram

ken

[jfa]

G'day Lin,

All ran fine on my system.

Win Xp SP2+

CPU Intel P4 2.27 GHz 8 kilobyte primary memory cache, 512 kilobyte secondary memory cache.

2048 Megabytes Installed Memory.

Nvidia GeForce FX5700 256 RAM

VideoMode 1280 by 960 pixels, 75 Hertz.

DirectX 9.0c

Impressive show, it is wonderful to see how much can be obtained from just one image. Maybe just a little lumpy on maximum zoom. This is probably the limit of the medium at this point in its development. Well done Lin, thanks.

[Hawk]

Hi Lin

Perfect smooth pan and zoom run with my Nvidia – GeForce4 MX 4000 video card. ( 128 MB )

In version 5 early stages Igor advised me this was a borderline card for Ver. 5, however as you are aware he has done quite a lot of work with this version as to tweak for different cards

Viewed at 1024 x 768 – on Pent 4 CPU – 2.4 GHz.

[Lin Evans]

I did get an email from a user with a Matrox Millenium G550 card who say it jitters really badly on his system. He says he has created the same type movements and had no problems with his own. I asked for more information and also for him to try downloading some other shows and see if it's possible to find something in common.

It's a tough one sometimes to figure out why a show will perform properly on one system and not another. I'm a bit surprised though that if it runs on Patrick's system that it doesn't run smoothly on about any system, but time will tell.

Best regards,

Lin

Hi Lin

Perfect smooth pan and zoom run with my Nvidia – GeForce4 MX 4000 video card. ( 128 MB )

In version 5 early stages Igor advised me this was a borderline card for Ver. 5, however as you are aware he has done quite a lot of work with this version as to tweak for different cards

Viewed at 1024 x 768 – on Pent 4 CPU – 2.4 GHz.

[Lin Evans]

Hi John,

Thanks! Good to hear that it works well on the Nvidia FX5700 - so far I've only had one response (email) from someone who has had trouble, but time will tell I guess.

Best regards,

Lin

G'day Lin,

All ran fine on my system.

Win Xp SP2+

CPU Intel P4 2.27 GHz 8 kilobyte primary memory cache, 512 kilobyte secondary memory cache.

2048 Megabytes Installed Memory.

Nvidia GeForce FX5700 256 RAM

VideoMode 1280 by 960 pixels, 75 Hertz.

DirectX 9.0c

Impressive show, it is wonderful to see how much can be obtained from just one image. Maybe just a little lumpy on maximum zoom. This is probably the limit of the medium at this point in its development. Well done Lin, thanks.

[ADB]

Hi Lin

Ran smooth on my Nvidia 6600 GT.

Your show reminded me of a place we ended up on a recent photography road trip, from the one spot without moving you could have taken 10 or so different strong compositions almost worth doing a 360 degree panorama then working out all the separate shots later :-)

One thing I have been toying with in the back of my mind is photographing a scene with a mosaic of say 25 shots then stitching these together to create an incredibly high resolution seemless image of the scene, you could then start fully zoomed out (or in) then do a HUGE zoom in (or out) without any quality loss as if compared to just taking a single image of the whole scene. It would appear as if you could just keep zooming and zooming - do you think PTE is up for that type of file size? Hmmm I guess maybe a problem for EXE's but it shouldn't worry VIDEO productions...

Cheers

Andrew

[alrobin]

One thing I have been toying with in the back of my mind is photographing a scene with a mosaic of say 25 shots then stitching these together to create an incredibly high resolution seemless image of the scene, you could then start fully zoomed out (or in) then do a HUGE zoom in (or out) without any quality loss as if compared to just taking a single image of the whole scene. It would appear as if you could just keep zooming and zooming - do you think PTE is up for that type of file size? Hmmm I guess maybe a problem for EXE's but it shouldn't worry VIDEO productions...

Andrew,

I did just that when we were over in Romania a couple of years ago - we were staying in an old Roman/medieval city called Brasov, and my wife and I hiked up to the top of a nearby mountain where I photographed the whole panorama with a 400 mm lens - 57 images in all, hand-held! (the lens is a Nikon VR lens, so that helped).

I then stitched all 57 images together using the "Autostitch" program from UBC (the one that you alerted us to a while ago), into an image 12,000 x 3,000 pixels (it made a fantastic print, 4 feet by 10 inches, I might add). I then resized and cropped the image down to about 5000 x 1500 (just enough to leave room for a bit of vertical pan) and tested it out in PTE - it was still very smooth.

I like to use this in discussions with film die-hards as an example of what can be done with digital technology - it is possible to photograph a subject in digital format with a 35-mm camera that will rival a print from the world's largest large-format film camera!

Here is how all 57 images look when arranged in order. (Lin's fine example is much sharper than mine, by the way).

[Lin Evans]

Hi Andrew,

The Cliff Palace pano is a stitch of five images. Right now the current largest stitched image contains over 2,000 images and is 13 gigapixels in size.

The first gigapixel stitched image was done by Max Lyons of a scene in Bryce Canyon, UT. Max used his old D60 (six megapixel) Canon to make 196 separate overlapping captures. He then had to write his own software to handle the stitching of the +2.00 gigabyte file. The result was a beautiful 1.09 gigiapixel image which was printed uninterpolated at 300dpi by LightJet technology. The largest print size possible for the LightJet used could not do it in on a single page so separate prints put the entire image together for the final ten by twelve foot print which Max displayed at PMA in Las Vegas three years ago.

I spent about forty five minutes examining the beautiful print which was absolutely breathtaking in detail. At the same PMA show another beautiful huge print was displayed by Peter Grote which he took in a single scan with his Betterlight scanning back. This one was taken in a single frame and consisted of over a 500 megapixel panorama file of a scene in the Annapurnas (mountain range in the Himalayas}. Peter was using a motorized pano head. He printed it at an uninterpolated 180 dpi on an Epson 9600 inkjet. The print was about 17 feet by 4 feet and done from roll paper so in one continuous piece. After carefully comparing the prints, Max actually had more detail from his stitched image.

So the bottom line is that it is entirely possible to have incredible resolution gained from overlapping multiple stitched images. The problem in displaying them (up to 2 gigabytes in size for all current Windows compatibility) is not PicturesToExe, but the computer hardware. Just stitching these huge images in an overwhelming task. Once they are stitched, the file size must be small enough to be amenable to the Windows operation system being used. For overall compatibility that would be 2 gigabytes of file size. But this would only be possible for an animated (pan, zoom, rotate) still image if the GPU (graphical processing unit) in the Video card could process the image and if the video card had sufficient RAM to handle such a load. With present technology this would only be possible if the images were broken down into bite-sized (byte-sized) pieces. So for performing an "infinite" zoom sort of as you see on Google Earth, you would need to mix different still images ending one with level of zoom in where the next begins. This can be done, but it requires careful mix and match techniques.

To a degree, doing a single zoom in on a reasonably highly detailed large panorama is quite possible, but likely to exceed the hardware capabilities of many users. Of course if you are only making the slideshow to be displayed on a projector using your own equipment, then whatever limitations that applied would only be applicable to your own system. Actually, the reason I posted this test is to approximate finding workable limits for this kind of application for general use.

Best regards,

Lin

Hi Lin

Ran smooth on my Nvidia 6600 GT.

Your show reminded me of a place we ended up on a recent photography road trip, from the one spot without moving you could have taken 10 or so different strong compositions almost worth doing a 360 degree panorama then working out all the separate shots later :-)

One thing I have been toying with in the back of my mind is photographing a scene with a mosaic of say 25 shots then stitching these together to create an incredibly high resolution seemless image of the scene, you could then start fully zoomed out (or in) then do a HUGE zoom in (or out) without any quality loss as if compared to just taking a single image of the whole scene. It would appear as if you could just keep zooming and zooming - do you think PTE is up for that type of file size? Hmmm I guess maybe a problem for EXE's but it shouldn't worry VIDEO productions...

Cheers

Andrew

[alrobin]

One thing I have been toying with in the back of my mind is photographing a scene with a mosaic of say 25 shots then stitching these together to create an incredibly high resolution seemless image of the scene, you could then start fully zoomed out (or in) then do a HUGE zoom in (or out) without any quality loss as if compared to just taking a single image of the whole scene. It would appear as if you could just keep zooming and zooming - do you think PTE is up for that type of file size? Hmmm I guess maybe a problem for EXE's but it shouldn't worry VIDEO productions...

Andrew,

I posted an example of a zoomed 25-image construction from the Brasov images here on my web site (7 Mb). I also posted a similar combined panned and zoomed version (11 Mb) from the full 57 images. In the former, the main image is approx. 4000 x 3000, and in the latter, 11,000 x 3000 pixels. PTE seems to handle them with no problem.

It's interesting, though, that in the zoomed version, particularly, since the lines of the buildings are sharper and finer at the beginning, there is a lot more shimmer. This is largely because of the interpolation going on, and the fact that many of the straight lines are only one or two pixels in width, thereby contributing uncertainty in just where to draw them as they move from one spot to another. Thus they tend to jump back and forth with the slow movement of the image. Once the image is larger, the lines consist of more pixels in width, and this "uncertainty" in interpolation is less noticeable.

[Igor]

Lin,

Matrox video cards are very slow in hardware accelerated 3D mode.

We can't do anything with it.

But now when Windows Vista released Matrox will prepare more fast video cards to be able operate in new 3D Aero Glass user interface.

[Lin Evans]

Hi Igor,

Thanks - I told Fred that this might be the case. I asked him to run dxdiag and see if his bus supported an AGP slot. If so, I gave him a link to a place to buy an inexpensive ATI Radeon 9800 Pro card which should work very well with larger and difficult animations.

Best regards,

Lin

Lin,

Matrox video cards are very slow in hardware accelerated 3D mode.

We can't do anything with it.

But now when Windows Vista released Matrox will prepare more fast video cards to be able operate in new 3D Aero Glass user interface.