Painfully slow loading

[gombul]

I am creating panos using Panorama Factory to make a 360 flat stitched image from my JPG photos. Then I'm using Pano2QTVR to make the .mov.

The problem is, it's taking incredibly long to load. I haven't even tested online yet, it's taking almost 5 minutes to load when the .mov file is only 2MB. This is offline!!!

What could be wrong??? It is slower in firefox than ie 7. What settings are ideal to use? I've tried equirectangular, cubic and cylindrical. All are slow, I'm wondering if I should be using something else to do the initial stitching?

[Trausti Hraunfjord]

Hi gombul.

Have you tried to use equirectangular stitches from other programs than Panorama Factory before converting to .mov and if you have, did that result in faster loading?

You could try something from HERE (http://images.google.com/images?q=equirectangular+&gbv=2&hl=en&newwindow=1&safe=off&sa=G&imgsz=huge)if you haven't got any locally. Chances of any or all of them being stitched in Panorama Factory would be slim to none.

If things are still slow, then you can rule out the PF as the culprit.... and could have a look at some other software for converting into cubes.

You could also upload the project in order for us others to check out if it is slow to load or not.

If you decide on changing stitching software, I would absolutely recommend PTGui. It's lightyears ahead of the others.

[gombul]

Hi Tuddi,

Here is the Panorama Factory sample:
http://tinyurl.com/6ojzgv

I might check out PTGui. What final pixel dimensions do you recommend aiming for in a cylindrical pano? My final movies are around 2MB and I'm happy with the quality I'm getting (70% jpg compression in Pano2QTVR).

I'm wondering if the speed issue has something to do with using incorrect settings in the XML. I've tried using another pano (but it was not a cylinder) and it loaded much faster, despite being slightly larger in filesize. Could the XML be getting confusing processing incorrect swf includes?

Gombul

[Trausti Hraunfjord]

You have this line in your parameters section:

loaderStreamed = 1

Try to remove it or set it to the default 0 value.

In the FPP documentation it says:

It is not recommended to use this property together with big cylindrical and spherical images.

The pano was absolutely terribly long to load, plus it choked my puter's CPU on both cores.

Try this and see if it will help.

[Trausti Hraunfjord]

http://upload.hraunfjord.org/files/PFkillingCPU.jpg

That's what it looked like. Went to the top when it started loading... didn't relax until it was fully loaded.

[gombul]

Mind giving it another spin? I've just set loaderStreamed to 0 and re-uploaded the xml.

So far, it's running alot better on our draft server. Could it be.......:p

[gombul]

I should mention, our servers have been on and off all day - incase you get nothing momentarily. It seems to be down at the minute.

[Trausti Hraunfjord]

Damned if it wasn't the solution to your problems :)

Cleared out my temporary internet files and tried again... and it went like hot knife through butter:

http://upload.hraunfjord.org/files/PFNOTkillingCPU.jpg

No problems at all. Throughout the loading, the CPU was doing 0-4% at most, and it took some 25 seconds to load, compared with around 4-5 minutes before.

But yes, the servers are unstable... earlier I was being cut off and unable to access etc.

[gombul]

That's weird because much to my dissapoinment, I just tried it at home (so absolutely no possibility of caching). In IE6 it crashed my whole system twice (had to reset). In Firefox it loaded nicely up to 100% (about 15 seconds) then held for about 3 minutes on "100%" before showing the FPP black screen of death. :(

[Trausti Hraunfjord]

For foolproofing my test, I cleared out the internet temp folder, emptied the trashbin, rebooted the puter and tried your link again. It took 15 seconds to load to 100%... further 4 seconds until it put the pano on display. The CPU was running at 0-4% as it did the last time. The above is done on Win XP and IE based Crazybrowser. Same result on Firefox on that machine.

Also tried it on my laptop, there it was beating the retarded single core Centrino CPU at around 35% until it reached 99% in loading (took around 20 seconds to load).... then the CPU hung at 100% for around 10 seconds, and displayed the pano without problems.

So on this end it's behaving well.

[gombul]

I tried opening one of our existing panos (that a contractor initially provided) and it worked no problem at all. On the same machine that froze trying the new pano. The original pano that works perfectly is at: http://tinyurl.com/5khgj5 (but his is not cylindrical)

In other words, my laptop wasn't the problem. In a way it sux that it works for you because that makes the problem harder to find! I can't launch it until I know it works as well as the link above.

So what to try next?

I tried downloading Flashificator to see if I could use the xml it generates but it didn't seem to work. The first time it outputted a JPG and xml file but the xml file was blank. Then each time after that, pressing the "flashificate" button just writes empty folders in "My Documents/My Panoramas".

Is there some sample XML that works well for cylindrical panos that I could look at somewhere else perhaps?

[HansNyberg]

Pano does not load correct on Mac. Cubefaces are in wrong order and 1 of them does not load at all.
Mac G5 dualcore 2.0 Safari and Firefox.

When using movdecoder you should use loaderstreamed=1 otherwise it takes up to 50 seconds on some systems to convert the movie after loading.

Or much better convert the movie to cubefaces and use them.

Hans

[gombul]

Hans,

Which one didn't work?
1. Original provided by contractor:
http://tinyurl.com/5khgj5

or

2. My attempt:
http://tinyurl.com/6ojzgv

I tried "convert to cubic" in Pano2QTVR but it distorts my cylinder pics into full 360. And the quality is poor.

Test page:
http://tinyurl.com/5ogf8e

[Trausti Hraunfjord]

I tried downloading Flashificator to see if I could use the xml it generates but it didn't seem to work. The first time it outputted a JPG and xml file but the xml file was blank. Then each time after that, pressing the "flashificate" button just writes empty folders in "My Documents/My Panoramas".

I took your .mov file for the outside shot from the temporary internet files folder and ran it through the Full version Flashificator that we are bug fixing, and ... well... there is a problem with it reckognizing cylindrical .mov files. So it won't add cylDecoder.swf and limits.swf to the project... and therefore not work. But that's going to be fixed in the Full version, so when a .mov file is chosen, the user will have to tick a box for a cylindrical .mov file in order for it to work.

I tried it with "loaderStreamed = 1", and the loading slowed considerably ... but even with it set to "0" the pano loads in around 10 seconds, when a single image cylindrical pano (2.37mb) loads in under half that time (using either loaderStreamed = 0 or 1 )

I agree with Hans that converting to another format (jpg) would be best both visually and for loading the images. If you don't have a converter that does the job well, I could try with what I have... and you could test the result... and maybe change to different software.

I'd even be happy to redo the stitching for your project in PTGui and send you back the result for testing/using.

The problem may very well be the stitching software (Panorama Factory) combined with the mov convertion and the fact that it is a cylindrical mov.

[gombul]

The thing I really don't get, is why would a JPG out of PTgui be different from a JPG out of PF? I mean, a big long JPG is a big long JPG, right???

As you can see from the test page, option 2 (using PTgui) seems to be the most reliable (not tested on Macs). The JPG is a little fuzzy out of the PTgui demo (even at max quality) compared to PF but I guess I can try sharpening in photoshop before importing into Pano2QTVR. Nice how you can drag the orientation in PTgui.

My boss has forked out $500 for PTgui (as we plan on doing many virtual tours in the future). I should have it later today then will do more testing.

[HansNyberg]

The original works perfect, It is also a real cubic movie with as far as I can see has 6x6 tiling and it has loaderStreamed = 1

Your is a cylindric movie and that is the problem. You should convert your original jpg image to a spherical and than either make cubefaces or a cubic movie using Pano2QTVR or Pano2VR.

If you keep it below 8000 pixels width you can also use the cylindric image directly I guess but do not use the cylindric movies.

Hans

[gombul]

I've updated the original movie to use cylinder mov (from PTgui Pro JPG stitch). It seems to be working fine at work, will test it on the laptop from home. If this doesn't work I'll try converting to cubic.

http://tinyurl.com/6ojzgv

[Trausti Hraunfjord]

Glad to know that you have PTGui. You will be glad for the shift!

Anyways... if you convert to cubic faces, you will be able to avoid the "Help! I'm being sucked into another dimension!" effect you get with the current mov rendering (where the ground seems to be sucked down under the camera position).

It loaded and behaved well on this end though.

[gombul]

Tuddi, would you mind quickly outlining the cubic process?

I opened Pano2QTVR then:

1. Radio button was on "Equirectangular" (so the "convert to cubic" button becomes active)
2. Chose my JPG pano that I processed using PTgui (5000x1685px)
3. Clicked "convert to cubic".
4. Clicked "create" to make a .mov from the outputted cube TIFs.

But I'm getting the sucking vortex of doom top and bottom when previewing the QTVR.

Logically, I assume this is because I'm choosing "equirectangular" in step 1, so it thinks my pano has more information top and bottom - whereas I actually only have a cylinder stitched image?

Should I still be trying to make a cubic mov when I don't have equirectangular data???

[Trausti Hraunfjord]

I would recommend you to use the PTGui to make the .mov file directly after stitching the project. You will get a full cube, but have black holes in top and bottom.

To deal with those, you use the borders.swf plugin

<borders>
pan_min =
pan_max =
tilt_min = -(your value)
tilt_max = (your value)
</borders>


in cooperation with

<parameters>
zoomMax = (your value)
zoomMin = (your value)
</parameters>

That way you should get the desired result.