What is Reddit's opinion of AutoPano?

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> 2. Don’t Shoot Panoramas

I feel like he has never used any good panorama software and only used the basic one that comes with photoshop/lightroom.

Any good panorama software will completely remove any distortion and will add a shit-ton of extra features.

Using a wide angle lens in portrait mode is one of the best things about wide angle lenses.

edit: Software I personally find best is Kolor Autopano.

I would recommend you render as many angles as possible until you are sure you have covered everything. Don't have anything too close to the camera either like I did in this video with the piano or the software will get confused. I used http://www.kolor.com/autopano-video/ to string all the clips together and ran a separate script against the video to make it 360 degrees. Relevant link: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6178631?hl=en-GB

Hope that helps!

32GB usually with 4 chrome windows x 10-30 tabs each. I run out of RAM often, but it's usually because of this. Thankfully this mobo supports 64GB... waiting for my next paycheck...

If you want ot use a normal camera, you can mount it on a tripod and take a series of photos then use something to stitch them, I have used Kolor Autopano Giga with really good results, I use a drone to take my photos as I am using the pano for a background on an apartment block simulation.

Since by the looks of it you already spend a few hundred dollars in hardware, why don't you just buy a real professional panorama software package instead of ICE?

Get something like Kolor Autopano and I'm sure it will work then.

>If I where to take multiple exposure of a chrome sphere myself and put them together into a HDRI, would the resulting mapping be spherical or angular ?

Depends on how you output the stitched images them. Multiple images on a tripod produces a superior image, but as /u/ephisus said chrome balls are good on set if you don't have 10 min to setup and shoot a good pano.

http://www.kolor.com/autopano/

I will go through my web history and find the tutorials and send them to you. I won't be able to get them right at this moment. I use AutoPano Video to edit (http://www.kolor.com/autopano-video/). I didn't know about Cinema 4D until you mentioned. It seems like C4D is more for animation VR videos, is that right? Mettle makes Cinema 4D and I am going to buy some software from Mettle to add 3D vr text in my videos. Using one camera can work but it takes a lot longer and if you have any actors it would be pretty tricky (nearly impossible). If you are just trying to show an empty room with 360 VR then one camera can potentially work. If you are talking about a one camera system that says it does 360 degree HD video than more than likely that company is lying. To do true 360 videos you need at least two cameras, if you only have one camera then you won't get the bottom. 2 cameras will not achieve full HD. Sure it may record in 1080 HD but that is spread across a field of view of 360 Degrees by 180 Degrees and so it comes out to be less than 480p when viewing it. I find this to be one of the most frustrating things of mis-representation marketing in our camera world today. Even 6 cameras won't achieve 1080p videos. I know that is a little confusing but I have done my math and double check my math on figuring this out. Also you say audio doesn't matter (and it might not for what you are trying to do) but psychology tests have shown that better audio quality is more important than better picture quality. Put some headphones in and watch this video to truly see the impact the 3D audio can have! ITS AMAZING. I haven't done anything with it myself but I want to! 360 VR is rabbit hole man:) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd5i7TlpzCk

Which software are you talking about? Kolor Autopano, Autovideo? There is a huge amount of Tutorials online: http://www.kolor.com/autopano/autopano-support/

If you want help, more detailed information about your problem would be helpful...

Try Microsoft ICE, I've found it's pretty good.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/ice/

http://www.kolor.com/autopano/download/ also has a trial. Watermark for free version, but you'll at least know if it can stitch.

There is the open source one, but it's incredibly user unfriendly and I've had limited luck with it.

This is only a test, but I think this is the future! Please Subscribe, or Like this video if you want to see more of these "360 Degree" races. If there's enough support, I'll get the official license to remove the AVP watermarks.

I'm currently trying out evaluations of VideoStitch and Autopano Video to see what one works best for creating these 360 videos. This video was created with Autopano Video.

Here are the links to both programs:
http://www.kolor.com/autopano-video/
http://www.video-stitch.com/

Let me know what you think!

Thanks for watching!
SgtSolo