SkiVR Virtual Reality with panoramas Everything about Panoramic Photography

At least we are nearly at the end ! It was a long work since nearly one year now and it’ll finish this week-end, we change our online shop system

End of life of current shop, that we had updated a little last year, and was running on Magento, to go with a modern and more flexible solution, and that is also french based, Prestashop !

This solution is lot more customisable and will allow us to offer rent services, second hand sales, and lot of other opportunities !

So our last step is final switch to new store, it’ll start this friday at the end of day (french time), and store will reopen at the latest on tuesday morning (or hopefully earlier if everything goes well). You’ll need to reinitialise your password to access at your account in new store (we transfer all accounts data and past orders, so you don’t loose history of your account with us)

Enjoy everyone the 3 days off during this week and see you back on tuesday for new store

Nick Fan presents very quickly in this video the next pole from Fanotec, that will allow to reach new height up to 9m, installed on Manfrotto tripod with special tripod adapter for pole. This is still an early preview of the product, not avalaible before few months yet !

To keep the whole setup stable, guy wire system is installed on each leg of tripod.

Perfect for really high point of view (it’s around height of third stairs).

As previously explained for launch of Freedom 360 system for panoramic video, we’ll offer starting on May 20th (we change our online shopping system on May 18th) Freedom 360 product for daily rent. It’ll allow everyone to test and discover without financial risk video panoramic video. It’ll be useful also for one time jobs without doing big investments !

Rent kit is composed of these elements:

-> Freedom 360 rig, the best product avalaible on market for easy shooting of panoramic video,

-> 6 GoPro HD Black cameras able to shoot HD video with batteries

-> 6 SDHC 64Go memory cards so you can shoot long time sessions

-> 6 USB chargers to charge all your cameras in same time (faster)

-> one CD including a copy of Videostitch software to stitch your videos (demo version allowing you to stitch videos up to 1600 x 800 pixels resolution) Read the rest of this entry »

This week has seen two important releases for fan of panoramic video. It looks like panoramic video is really taking off and I guess we still have numerous new features and technologies to discover in next few months.

-> Videostitch, automated stitching software for video to get panoramic videos, is now avalaible as public beta since this week. Windows and Linux version are already avalaible (Mac version soon avalaible). Download page is avalaible on this link. It’s the perfect tool to use with the new Freedom 360 avalaible in store so you get whole solution to shoot and stitch easily all your panoramic videos. Be careful that you need NVidia graphic card in your computer to be able to run Videostitch, it uses extensively the Cuda technology (developped by NVidia) ! You’ll find here on editor website some explanations about graphic cards you can use. Take profit of it so long it’s in beta as the basic version is free for now and allows you to do already some very nice videos

-> Kolor Eyes, an application for now for iPad, is a very easy to use panoramic video player. It uses all the power of HTML5 for fluent rendering of video. The app is freely avalaible on iTunes Store and includes complete sample sequences, but you can also indicate an URL and the app will download and play the video in the iPad. Multiple projections are avalaible and it also handle the gyroscopic capabilities of iPad. We can hope Android version will be soon avalaible so everyone can enjoy the nice technology…

Short presentation video: 

Here we are, during 2012 year, we have read a lot of announcements and projects about panoramic video, now hardware starts to appear and be really avalaible

Joergen Geerds has been the first one to work in this domain. Famous panophotographer, he made himself the first research and development of prototypes based on GoPro cameras. GoPro cameras are really good compromise between quality and prices, and their small size allows to combine them physically in a small space so videos shots can be pretty easily stitched to get a whole spherical video

And so it’s birth of Freedom360, this product allows you to combine up to 6 GoPro Hero3 (whatever model) to shoot easily the 360 degrees video without hole at nadir or zenith.

You can then stitch the videos either manually with automated scripting system and using stitching software such as PTGui that can be batched, or use the “soon” avalaible softwares dedicated for that such as Video Stitch or also Kava.

Then you can publish online your works using either existing software such as KRPano that support natively display of 360 videos and navigation, or tools such as Kolor Eyes.

Don’t forget you’ll need a powerful computer and lot of storage for treatment and stitching, and also good internet connection to upload videos and view them !

Freedom360 is already avalaible for order in store and deliveries will start in the next few days for the ones that want to try that new techology. We also offer on quotation loan services of the whole solution (the rig plus cameras and memory cards, and also in option stitching services, and online publication). We also offer the whole setup on rent (more details here).

Spherical panorama shot April 14th 2013 on terrace of Pic Blanc in early morning before opening of the resort (8h30 am). Panorama is avalaible in two versions: regular one, and one with legend so you can recognize easily all major mountains around. Legend done (with greetings of author) with Generate a panorama tool developed by Ulrich Deuschle.

Technical details:

• Pentax 645D in DNG with lens 55mm f/2.8 (settings: 1/500 at f/11), 78 shots on Nodal Ninja 5 with R-D16 rotator on tripod Benro C-257. (one row at +75 degrees with 8 shots, one row at +45/+15/-15/-45 degrees with 15 shots, one row at -75 degrees with 8 shots, 2 nadir handheld shots)
• Raw processing in TIFF 16 bits with Lightroom 4
• Sistching with PTGui and PSB output
• Tiling with KRPano

Regular version:

Version with legend:

Partial panorama shot this last wednesday april 3rd with weather a little cloudy for a nearly complete view of Alpe d’Ahuez, from top of Auris, near top station of Fontfroide chairlift.

Be careful, it’s not a mosquito above mountain in sky but Pic Blanc telecabin in fly

Technical details:

• Pentax 645D in DNG with lens 55mm f/2.8 (f/11, 1/500), 5 shots in portrait mode
• Conversion to TIFF 16 bits with Lightroom
• Stitching with PTGui and output in PSB format
• Tiles with KRPano

Attempt to shoot partial panorama with medium format camera handheld last friday march 15th 2013 with damn freezing weather and wind !
Technical details:

• Pentax 645D in DNG format with lens 55mm f/2.8 (settings: 1/2000 at f/11), 9 shots handheld
• Raw development to TIFF 16 bits with Lightroom
• Stitching with Autopano Giga 3 and final result in PSB file
• Tiles conversion for online publishing with KRPano