Seamless videoplayer workflow.

  • Hi All,
    There have been a few threads on this topic but not a lot of detail about best practices for workflow.

    Here is a small example I have been working on. I have a few questions for those of you that have been down this path.


    Here is my workflow so far.


    1. Shoot pano. D800, Samyang 14mm used for both stills and video. ( probably not the best lens choice for the video but I wanted to get the workflow right with the same lens first.
    2. Using the "perfect pixel alignment" technique, export image that is slightly larger than video frame in ptgui.
    3. In Nuke ( or AE ) use a grid warp to align the video image to the image exported from ptgui.
    4. Create soft edge matte in around video image merged over background still from ptgui.
    5. Render frames out of nuke.
    6. Export mp4
    7. Embed in video hotspot in krpano ( krpano-1.17.5 )


    Example here.


    http://www.phimedia.com/WebSites/Video/tour.html


    Question 1 . With the mpg version, in chrome I see dark edges around the video. These are net evident in FF. is there any way to remove these in Chrome?


    There is also some colour shift in the video that I assume is due to the mp4 compression as tif files that were exported were seamless. Next I tried with alpha to soften edge.

    I would have liked to have used alpha in an flv but Adobe dropped flv export support in CC. I have a laptop with CS6 which still had flv support but I cannot get krpano to load the flv's ( either with or without alphas).

    Can anyone who has successfully embedded flv's with alpha shed some light?

    As CC no longer exports flv's is there another option for alpha?


    Example ( broken ) here


    http://www.phimedia.com/WebSites/Video/tour_alpha.html


    xml


    http://www.phimedia.com/WebSites/Video/tour_alpha.xml



    Link to flv


    http://www.phimedia.com/WebSites/Video/video_with_alpha.flv

    Any comments about my workflow would be welcome.


    Thanks
    Mike


  • I think your process could be improved. There should be no reason to have to warp the video in AE.

    To simplify things, you can shoot your video at the same time as you shoot your stitch. "You need extra care here because, you can forget to shoot your nadir when you've finished your video"
    Then you explode your video into frames.
    Use the pixel perfect technique to output a video frame to rectalinear format, and save the template.
    BATCH ALL the video frame.
    Take all the frames and re-assemble the video.
    Now your video should be pixel perfect to the panorama without having to warp anything into place.

    Now here's an extra step, If you should brackets/hdr, your video frames will look crappy and off-color, so you can bring a frame and 360 into photoshop and try to match color.
    Then you can also bring in a edge overlay and photoshop action that so it'll blend from video frames into your hdr.
    Basically the same as you except with photoshop and no hand-warping of the video.

  • Mikedunn, I use the same workflow a you, And it's pretty long and not always easy to match exported rectilinear view of the panorama and video in AE...
    For your dark edges ( or lines ? ) it might be because mp4 have to keep a ratio (not flv) so when you export in mp4 it can add or remove 1px high or large.
    Looks like Sacha have a better workflow but I must admit I didn't understand everything...
    Sacha, you take a pano with a fisheye for exemple, a video with the same lens, export a frame of the video (which won't have the same dimension than the still pictures), align the pictures + the video frame in ptgui? and then ???
    Could you give us some more explanations for nuts ?
    Many thanx !

  • The video will be exactly the same as one of the images you used to build your 360. You just remove all the other images and save that as a template to process all the video frames. No need to align anything. Just shoot your video right after you shoot the direction you need and then switch back to brackets or just do that direction last.


  • Thanx for your answer Sasha, but with my d800 video is 1920x1080 and pictures are 7360 × 4912 wich is not the same size and the same ratio, can't take video with a 3:2 ratio...
    What camera do you use to have the same sizes and ratio ?

    Oh, my canon 5dii does full frame video. You should still be able to line up the video frame with zero parrallax though. Just do control points from the frame to the image and optimize ypr.
    If you video is cropped, you should be able to calculate the fov without having to optimize it.
    Another idea instead of overlaying a mask frame on the images, is just use a png hotspot extracted with the pixel perfect method. Duh. That probably saves a lot of processing.

  • is use PTGUI BATCH ALL the video frame?how to do it qucikly?only six img and manymany video frames

  • Just curious *whistling*

    I may have job to create a 360 and then have 3 video hotspots in various locations around the single scene. Each one is 2 people stood together talking to each other so the result would look quite similar to the original post on this thread but just with another two videos. Only one video plays at a time though when click on.

    If I was to shoot the 360 first with a 5D MK2 and a 15mm fisheye (all the images) would I then film the video at each spot using the same fisheye lens or do you need to change the lens to a 50mm or perhaps just put a 24mm -105mm on and film it in frame? The lighting won't be changing at all because it's indoors on a theater stage.

    I'm concerned about the fisheye distortion while filming but then also there may be a drastic change if in light / colour if I change lenses.

    Practiced the perfect pixel alignment tutorial and got the hang of it.

    Thanks for any advice,

    Andrew

  • I only did a few and some with flash panorama player which are now gone and converted to Krpano.
    I'll pm you some links. My site is a mess right now and largely abandoned except for its Krpano tour building capabilities.
    I've been planned an upgrade and redesign but keep getting sidetracked.

  • Apologies for starting this thread up again but I was curious to know which software explodes the video to frames?

    I've tried VLC via command prompt and some other freebies but no luck. I'm currently downloading the trial version of Adobe Premiere Pro CC to see if that does it.

    Thanks

  • Apologies for starting this thread up again but I was curious to know which software explodes the video to frames?

    I've tried VLC via command prompt and some other freebies but no luck. I'm currently downloading the trial version of Adobe Premiere Pro CC to see if that does it.

    Thanks

    Pr AE and any other non linear editing sofeware

  • Thanks Tmhok,

    Premier did offer the option to export as what ever format you like. Unfortunately my movie clips were in no condition to be used within the 360 as they looked pretty bad quality.

    The 360 was shot in a low lit 3.5m X 2.8m area (a small storage room with shelves all around) so the 4 subjects were pretty close to the lens.

    The 360 looks fantastic as there's a lot of post work to make it look like it's located somewhere else but the movie clips of each person are far too grainy in the dark light so no good for use as a 'mouse over' replacement.

    Probably just as well as to be honest I really don't understand the full procedure anyway of what to do once I've exploded all the movie frames to tiffs (approx 150 for each person)

    What I'll do now is get a copy of each person from the 360 using the perfect pixel alignment and then just edit the pics in Photoshop so they look different on mouse over.

    Perhaps I can try this videoplayer thing again on another project but this time in a larger well lit area.

    Cheers.

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