hello,
 
i plan on buying realviz stitcher, as it appears to render what i am looking for.
the question : can stitcher render or export a circular fisheye although i dont have a fisheylense?
i am in posession of a tripod with pano head and would be able to shoot 360 panoramas.
can stitcher do the rest and can it handle a huge amount of data, because the files are coming
from a hasselblad h3d?
 
thanks in advance
 
peter  

peterdohm
RealViz Stitcher Unlimited can stitch full spherical or cubic images from pretty much any camera and set of images.  
 
With a non-fisheye or wide-angle lens, like something in the neighborhood of 50mm, the capture technique is called "Multi-Row" and goes something like this, with the camera in portrait position, 12-16 shots taken with the camera tilted 45° up, 12-16 taken with the camera level and another 12-16 tilted 45° down and maybe a Zenith and a Nadir shot.
 
All I know about the Hasselblad is that it has a massive number of pixels, so your concern may be valid. If you can shoot at a smaller image size, you may want to try it out with the Demo Version of Stitcher Unlimited and work your way up in the image size settings for the camera.
 
Unless you're planning on printing out wall sized panoramic posters, the Hasselblad is probably overkill for virtual photography. For display over the Internet, you'll be doing massive down-sizing since the average computer screen these days is 1024x768

hi djaurand,
 
thanks so much for your fast answer.
i am happy to hear that realviz can render full spherical images.
i am planning to do some large scale fish eye fotos within the range of 2 x  2 m so i need this much pixel.
 
i will try the demo version!
 
thanks again
 
peter
 
 

Peter
When you're using a Multi-Row capture, you;re getting a huge amount of pixels.
 
I have a Canon XTi with a 10 megapixel sensor. If I do 3 rows of 10 shots plus a Zenith and Nadir (note that I don't do Multi-Row capture), I'd get 320 Million pixels. With a 33% overlap for stitching and alignment, Id still have roughly 200 million pixels.  
 
That would probably be more than enough to print a 2x2 meter poster.
 
I'm just suggesting, start out smaller and work your way up since the smallest sensor listed for the H3D is 22 Megapixels. (I looked it up on wikipedia)
 
Good luck. We'd love to see some examples if you can get them online

hi djaurand,
 
thanks a lot for your advice. beeing a little stubborn coming to quality, i could need 557 million pixel for a 2 x 2 m photo with 300 dpi.
 
were you succesful with 200 million pixels?
 
that would be a hint for what is possible....
 
thanks!

I've got a 5250 x 1002 panoramic poster I print out on Epson's discontinued  8.3 x 23.8 inch Panorama Paper with about a 2 inch margin on the sides on an Epson R320 and its pretty nice.
 
It would be better if the 5 source photos hadn't been shot with my old Nikon Coolpix 950 (2 megapixels).
 
At 300dpi it would be about 17.5 inches of image on a 23.8 inch wide piece of photo paper.
 
If the image is going to be 2 meters x 2 meters, with the paper being bigger, you may be on target, because that would be about 550 million pixels at 300dpi
 
I'm just suggesting shooting the same scene both ways, smaller (maybe 10mp) and large (full capacity of your camera) to make sure you can get at least one to stitch as a test.  
 
If it turns out the large size works fine, then you can use it safely, knowing you can stitch that many, huge photos in the future.
 
If the large size doesn't work, you won't have to go back to the location and reshoot smaller photos
 
Its just my nature to take the conservative approach to ensure some level of success

Hi Peter,
 
On my PC (Vista, 2Gig Ram) I'm finding I'm already pushing stitcher when working at 8k x 4k resolution (about 30MP). Issue is not so much with the stitching as with the blending part of the process. Advice 6 months ago from RV's tech support was to go down to about 12.5MP (5k x 2.5k) with the smart blend option, if I wanted to avoid swapping, and sometimes crashes. Or else don't use smart blend - but it's not called smart for nothing, it's REALLY much better than the other options.