An Inexpensive Video Panorama System
bcmeikle@shaw.ca Week 1,
, Week 2
, Week3
, Week4
, Week5
, Week6
Week 1:
For some time now I've
been making video panoramas
.
but how to capture them
has remained a mystery.
Here's a
great page that shows
a ton of panoramic video systems.
However when we talk
about the QTVR community, we want fairly inexpensive, and it has to work
on a
macintosh computer....
Today I started working
on this So far they're just duct taped onto a book but there are 6 wide
angle video cameras (firewire) :
The cameras are
fire-i board cameras
with a wide angle lens. They cost $129 so
6 of them costs $774...
The first problem I ran into was getting
the cameras to all work at once. Most of the first day was spent
wrestling with 2 6 port hubs I bought. It turns out that plan 'a'
wouldn't work. As soon as I connected a second hub all heck broke loose.
Some firewire didn't work, and it even knocked out my USB! (the keyboard
went dead)
So at dinner, I thought that it
was nice to have the cameras but it would be a long road to getting a
panoramic video out of them.
After dinner I tried daisy chaining
them. I took the output firewire from camera 1 and put it in camera 2 and
it worked great!
All the camera lights did go off
at the end of that session. There wasn't enough power for 6 cameras coming
across the firewire I guessed, so I put a 12 volt power supply in to the
first camera in the daisychain.
The first app I downloaded to test
was called Live Channel Pro. It allowed me to play all 6 videos at once.
Then I downloaded Ben Birds' Security
Spy software. It was there that I got my first view of my goal: 6 cameras
displaying in realtime in a single window!
So, if 6 realtime vids can display in a single window,
can I put them together side to side, in a rough stitch and write them
to the drive?
After that it would just be a question of using helmut's
tool PanoTools to do the final stitch with an applescript?
in post production.
Day 3:
Feb 15, 2004:
I'm pretty happy with how
it's going. I was able to get my little application (based on apple sample
code)
to work today. The sample code showed how to do a video sequence grab
for a single camera, but I was unsure of
how it would go with 6 cameras.
So I have 6 windows open as I type,
each with a different view of the room. Now all I have to do
is figure out how to get all the windows into one (like above but stretched
out) and save that to disk. I want max
resolution and the drive has to be able to not fail.
Day 4:
I got all the videos drawing into the same
window and I'm working on saving to disk...
Day 6:
Spent a few days rewriting the code with jon summers from
vrtools
Today I built Hat1, which is way too spread out but may work for my first
panos...
I'll use evocam
to catch some video if I can.
Feb 14,2003
I'm impressed that just 7 days after
I started I can show this rather primitive proof of concept