Instructions for use:1. Open QTVR2MOV and click “Open Pano”. You will be shown an open dialog box to choose a movie, then asked to choose a folder to store the sequence of stills. If there are any JPEGs left from previous runs you will be asked if they should be deleted.
CAUTION: CUBIC format only, cylindrical movies do not understand the ‘tilt’ parameter! Panos with auto-rotate sprites are also a bad idea.
2. Choose the dimensions of the video sequence from the popup button. Current choices are: 320x240; 400x300; 600x400; 720x480 DV-NTSC; 720x534 NTSC Square; 720x576 DV- PAL and 768x576 PAl Square.
The ‘Square’ settings are only for projects for DVD that will be seen on TV screens. The DV format uses non-square pixels, so images that look correct on computer screens will look squashed on a TV screen. This effect is not usually noticeable, but you can get around it by making a movie at the ‘square’ setting and then exporting the resulting movie from QuickTime Pro at the non-square size.
3. Pick the direction of rotation, left or right.
4. Pick a frame rate. If you have chosen a DV size for the dimensions this will already be set to 25fps or 29.97fps as appropriate. Available frame rates are 10; 15; 24 for film; 25 for DV- PAL; 29.97 for DV-NTSC and 30.
5. Pan around the movie until you find the point you want to start the sequence and click “Set Start Position”. Pan around to the point you want to end at and click “Set End Position”. You can click on “Go To Start Position” and “Go To End Position” to double-check your positions. The newest version will show you the pan/tilt/fov figures for the current view, start position & end position.
6. Enter the duration in seconds.
7. Click “Make Movie”. The pano will slowly rotate from start point to end point, saving each frame as a JPEG in the folder that you chose, with a name like “100000001.jpg”.
7a. Instead, you can click “Pan 360˚”. The pano will slowly rotate from the start point, through 360˚ back to the start point, giving a movie that can be looped.
CAUTION: QTVR2MOV must be the front most application; it is effectively capturing screenshots of itself so any windows that go over the top of it will be captured instead of the pano.
8. On Mac OS 9 or X a couple of beeps will sound and the image sequence will be opened up in QT Pro at the frame rate that was chosen. You can now export it in the compression codec of your choice. On Windows you will have to do this step manually.
Getting the best results:
Use a fairly high-resolution pano, especially if you plan to zoom in far.
Make sure that the window size of the QTVR is within 50% of the final video, QT isn’t very good at showing QTVRs at smaller sizes, e.g. a 900x600 pano will not show cleanly when displayed at 400x300.
If the movie is to be seen on a TV screen there should be NO pure whites in the image. Reduce the lightest highlight to 80% or less before making the cubic movie.
If there is a lot of fine detail, especially high contrast detail, apply a horizontal motion blur to the original flat pano in Photoshop before converting it to a pano movie, this should help reduce the ‘creep’ effect that is unavoidable when making a series of totally stationary stills into a video sequence.
I also recommend exporting the final movie from QT with a ‘blur’ filter setting of 1-2, which should also help with the creeping effect if it is still noticeable. It will be a trade-off between jitter and sharp detail in the final video sequence.
Known Bugs:
Windows XP Screen Flicker - QTVR2MOV forces a screen redraw on XP each time it saves a frame, this has no effect on the images but all icons on the desktop will flicker each time. Irritating but functional.
JPEG as text on Mac OS - For some reason the JPEG files are coming up as text files on OS 9 & X, they are still JPEGs and will open fine in QT Pro, but double-clicking on the files will open them in a text editor.
Error Checking - There is currently no error checking for available HD space on either platform or for the existence of QT Pro on Mac OS.
