This page came about because a SMUG member asked how I made a QuickTime VR, a nearly full sweep around the horizon from a spot near Hurricane Hill, in Olympic National Park. This is not intended to be a complete explanation of QTVR, but maybe it can serve as a starter.

• See the Hurricane Hill QTVR before (or without) reading the how-I-did-it. Be aware that it’s nearly 300K.

• Go back to the Hart home page.

A simple QTVR like this one is possible with nothing more than a good digital camera, Photoshop CS and free software from Apple. Here’s the step-by-step procedure:

1. Find a good place to take the initial pictures. Many QTVRs are landscape panoramas, but don’t let that limit you. A single image, even a cropped close-up or a single indoor image can be fun to turn into QTVR movies. I saw the Hurricane Hill QTVR in my mind as I scanned the horizon from a particular vantage point on a walk not far from my house.

2. For the Hurricane Hill QTVR, I set my camera, a Nikon Coolpix 5700, to fixed focus on infinity, and held down the Lock button for each shot to make sure the exposures were all the same.

3. I tilted the camera into the portrait orientation, and got my body into a comfortable place to be able to rotate around nearly 360˚.

4. I held the camera fairly close to my body and turned my body to take each shot. For handheld panoramas, this mimics, to some extent, the tripod and specialized equipment the pros use.

(You can find much more on the web about doing QTVR seriously. For example, see QTVR and Adobe GoLive.)

I also checked visually to keep the horizon, er, horizontal in each shot. Finally, I checked visually to make sure that each shot substantially overlapped the previous one. I picked a landmark near the right edge of each image and made sure that same landmark was near the left side of the next image (I was shooting from left to right).

5. Once I got home, I downloaded the images to iPhoto and clicked through them to see if the images seemed to jump up and down a lot. It’s not impossible to rescue a series of images that are not taken in a single plane, but the resulting panorama might be awfully slim, top to bottom. Here’s the original series of images. They looked pretty good as a sequence, so I proceeded.

6. In iPhoto, I selected all of the photos in the sequence and dragged them into a new folder on my desktop. In Photoshop CS, I selected File > Automate > Photomerge, then selected the folder in the resulting dialog box.

7. Photomerge didn’t put the images in the correct order, so I set up my Mac so I could see both Photoshop and iPhoto. (Having two monitors makes this easier!) I used iPhoto to make sure I knew what order the photos should be in. In Photoshop’s Photomerge dialog box, I dragged the photos out of the way if needed, then dragged them into sequence. I used some landmark in each photo to drop it to overlap with the previous one in the Photomerge dialog box. When I dropped it close to the right place, Photomerge automatically moved the image into near perfect alignment.

8. I cropped the panorama in Photoshop so that it was one very wide rectangle. This is a turning point in making a QTVR, where you can see if your individual photos are aligned well enough.

Now comes the hard part. I had a panorama, but I wanted to turn it into an interactive QTVR movie.

Editorial: I can’t believe Apple let QTVR fall into the shadows. This is one of the coolest technologies in the universe, and Apple let a set of free applications slide into the professional realm. (Apple sells QTVR software for OS X, but at a high price.) In my humble opinion, Apple should take the basics of QTVR technology and incorporate them into iLife. Professionals need a lot more tools, but “the rest of us” should have access to the basics.

To use what remains of Apple’s free QTVR software, you have to travel back in time, back to PICT images, back to OS 9 (AKA Classic). So get ready...

9. The Apple QTVR software that you can still get free (see links below) only works in OS 9, and it requires the panorama to be in PICT format. So the first step is to save the panorama you made in Photoshop, with a couple of changes.

First, you want to use Image > Image Size to set the vertical height of the image. I chose 400 pixels.

Next, you want to preset the height and width for QTVR Make Panorama 2. It likes the vertical dimension to be divisible by 4 (hence my choice of 400 pixels) and the horizontal dimension to be divisible by 96. If your set of images totals less than 360 degrees, you can just add some black space to make the horizontal dimension work out right. That’s what I did. If you want to get fancy, you can make the black space fade from the image to black and back, and/or show some text in the black space, say your name and where the panorama comes from.

Now, you need to turn the panorama 90 degrees counterclockwise. Why? Only the programmers know for sure, but QTVR Make Panorama 2 needs to have the dimension you want to be the vertical in the final QTVR to be the horizontal dimension in the PICT image.

Finally, save the image in PICT format. Here’s a screenshot.

10. The last bit isn’t as hard as it might seem. I just fired up QTVR Make Panorama 2, waited for Classic to start, and chose the PICT image:

11. I left all the default settings as is, but you should feel free to fiddle. QTVR Make Panorama 2 doesn’t take too long to make a .mov file. Once again, here’s the result, a QTVR panorama near Hurricane Hill, Olympic National Park, Washington.

Links to more information:

Canadian Nature Photography Site

Apple’s QuickTime Tools

QTVR and Adobe GoLive (Contains many excellent links about QTVR)

Link to download a pdf file: Make Panoramas with older versions of Photoshop