QuickTime VR Authoring Studio

Rating:
Updated: 24 Mar 1999 at 5:00 GMT, by James Rigg [Panoguide]

Until relatively recently QTVR Authoring Studio was the only application for stitching sequences of images into panoramas. The QTVR image format is the de facto standard for publishing panoramas in a virtual-world way. Perhaps the most important thing to remember about QTVR Authoring Studio is that it is not a mere image stitcher - it is a suite of applications which allow for the stitching of images into both panoramas and object movies and the creation of virtual worlds with those movies. Although stitched panoramas can be saved as images that is not the main purpose of the application.

QTVR Authoring Studio has a very straight forward interface, but which puts a lot of controls at your fingertips. The tasks of creating object movies, panoramas and assembling these into virtual tours and defining hotspots, are all separate. If you like the simple don't-ask-me-any-questions style interfaces you might at first be confused or put-off by the QTVRAS interface, but it is worth spending the time to experiment and become familiar with the interface as there is a lot you can achieve with it.

Panorama Maker
One commendable feature of the panorama maker is the image alignment panel. You can choose to simply click and drag the images into alignment (assuming of course you even need to), or you can specify the parameters for the stitch numerically, or you can get it roughly right and let QTVRAS fine-tune the settings for you. This might sound over complex but in fact it is amazingly easy and the ability to find your own way of aligning images is a great bonus. The application puts you firmly in control whilst at the same time being powerful enough to do the job for you if you don't want to. However it has to be said that the various lens configuration windows could surely be simplified into one or two at most.

In the tests QTVRAS struggled to automatically stitch the 35mm sequences and although it successfully stitched both of the 18mm sequences without assistance it didn't find the best stitch points. For all of the tests manual alignment was used to get the best result - fortunately doing so is simple!

The test images are superb. A few glitches appear in the 18mm sequences which could fairly easily be re-touched or improved (if a little more care was taken in manually aligning images near problem areas). Interestingly QTVRAS appears to incorporate slight banding in images that have repeating patterns (the Royal Albert Hall stitch).

Object movies
The object maker is a very simple and straight forward object movie creator. It will accept a set of images as well as images captured from a video camera attached to the computer. You can of course control all the playback settings, image compression and embed annotations and copyright information.

One of the most interesting features is the ability to create multiple 'views' of the object - this then allows for the object to be viewed in multiple states, as well as being able to rotate and tilt the object.

It is a shame however that QTVR Authoring Studio is unable to correct for 'wobble', i.e. allow you to adjust the image centre or position to correct for an object that has been shot off centre. Fortunately a number of free utilities from Ken Turkowski including de-Jitter (see www.worldserver.com/turk/quicktimevr/fisheye.html) allow you to improve your object movies.

Scenes (virtual tours)
Once you have created your panoramas and/or object movies, the scene maker allows you to link these all together into a virtual tour. The interface allows you to load in a map so that you can plot in your objects and panoramas and link them together. For each link you can specify the view/position of the target that will be shown when you switch from one to the other. You can also link to websites and external (non QuickTime) things. Finally when you build the virtual tour, you can alter the compression settings and size.

Conclusions
Overall QTVRAS is fantastic - a great interface and great results. However if you are only interested in panoramic photography and not in object movies or virtual tours, it seems like a lot of money to pay. Also QTVRAS is only available for Apple Mac and it doesn't look like any new versions (for Mac or PC) are on they're way. If you are a professional photographer and have an Apple Mac this is for you.

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